Pedro Sttau

SEO is all about following a couple of simple procedures, but above everything else, it’s about following your innate common sense.

The purpose of this post is not to tell you what you should be doing, but rather what you definitely should avoid doing.

1. Too many links in a short time

This is a very common mistake that even the most experienced SEOs seem make.
If you are marketing a new domain, and don’t want it to get sandboxed, and believe me you DON’T, do not get too aggressive with your link building efforts. Keep your inbounds under 20 per month.

2. Do NOT attempt to hide keywords using CSS

Google has automated ways of detecting this. Don’t do it, you will get caught and your site will get wiped out. It’s as simple as that.

3. Don’t buy links in the wrong places

The politically correct advice would be “don’t buy links, period”. But in the real World, everyone buys links, and anyone who will tell you otherwise is in denial.

At present, and despite claims otherwise, Google will not penalize your website for buying links, at worse it will neutralize the inbound that they suspect has been purchased.

I have never heard of Yahoo inbounds being “zeroed”, nor have I heard of Aviva Directory links having a negative impact on a site, and guess what, in one way or the other they are both link brokers, and Google knows about it.

Therefore, try and limit your investment to safe reputable directories/websites.

4. Don’t gather too many reciprocal links

A reciprocal link does not necessarily hold less value then a one way link, but too many reciprocal links might trigger a spam alert that could neutralize all your reciprocals.
So it’s ok to have a couple of them, especially if they are in context with the content of your website, just don’t over do it.

5. Keyword density, there is a limit

Having the proper keyword text density is a very important factor. By density I am referring to the ratio of keywords or key phrases to the total number of words on a page. I have seen evidence that a ratio above 5% will have a negative impact.

6. Don’t publish too many outbound links in a single page

Especially if the links are not relevant to your website’s content. This can be detrimental as not only will it affect your ability to pass PR juice to the site’s your linking too, as it will also affect the way the content is perceived by the bots.

7. Don’t spam the Header Tags

Header tags are interpreted by the Major search engines as indicators of the order of importance of the content. Abusing this concept will not help you at all, as it will trigger a spam alert.

I strongly believe that the content ratio within header tags is a factor that is analysed by the SE’s, either there is literally character count, which would mean for example, that a if you have too much text within a h1 tag, that specific content would be homogenised and wouldn’t benefit from being placed within a header at all, or it would simply be marked as spam.

Either way, it’s not a good idea to try and alter your content structure just to gain an advantage that in the end isn’t going to happen.

8. Duplicate content

Let’s face it; even though they have come a long way, the crawl process used by the SEs is still very much rudimentary in certain aspects, and good intentions don’t really seem to count. Sometimes you are duplicating your content without really intending too, and without knowing it.

Duplicate content within the same domain is something that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Be careful with your print versions pages, duplicate articles allocated to multiple categories, etc…

9. Too many inbounds from the same IP

I’m not even talking about Inbound Networks (which is naturally also an issue). But try to keep a track of your campaign inbound links, noting the IP address of each domain that is linking to you and do your best not to get too many links from the same Class C IP range.

10. Title Keyword stuffing

Let’s use our common sense here again, if the content in the title of the pages is extremely relevant to the SEs, abusing this element will carry the same degree of exposure. Stuffing your Titles with keywords is not the way to go.

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