Are You Sabotaging Your SEO Success?
By Jennifer Horowitz EcomBuffet.com
You
probably are and you dont even know it.
Lets look at a few key events in SEO, not in chronological order
-- just by highlighting a few key events.
Doorway pages were the hottest thing everyone used them, and
they worked!
Until
Google caught on that people were just trying to trick them, and
they banned the pages. Mouths dropped in shock, as top ranked
sites dropped from sight.
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Reciprocal links were all the rage. Emails flying: You link
to me, Ill link to you. Everyone was fast becoming friends
and creating an interlinked information network.
Until Google
caught on that this isnt a true representation of how popular
your site is, people are just creating link farms and mass-generating
faux link popularity. More mass droppage of sites from the
SERPs.
One-way links are definitely the way to go. Its exactly
what Google wants, and if we buy a link from another website,
Google will see it as a viable one-way link to my site. Who says
you cant buy love. Ive got Google lovin me.
Until Google
realizes there are sites with high PageRank, making a nice monthly
income for linking to sites that have not earned the link the
faux link popularity issue is just perpetuated.
With some all of the link confusion, it is a constant source for
debate: reciprocal is OK, as long as it is relevant and from a
high PR site. One way is the only way to go, but only
if it is relevant and from a high PR site. What is high PR anyway,
is it anything above 3 or 4 or 5?
With all the questions flying, attention seemed to go back to
a new and improved type of doorway page. One that includes links
to other sites (resources) underneath text for your site.
This is great this technique is legit, you are providing value
to people by having helpful links on your site, and the search
engines just happen to view those links as keyword rich, so they
boost your rankings.
It made sense to the engines, and was easy to do. Great weve
finally found a way to create some great pages that Google likes.
Until Google
sees the internet infiltrated with sites that are nothing but
mass-produced pages with no customization. Resource pages spit
out by software, with no real content. That ended the resource
page hay day.
Blogs are it. Everyone can create a free blog and then
blog and ping like crazy. Drive spiders to your blog when you
ping, they follow links in your posts to your main site, and next
thing you know you can control Googlebot, and Yahoo Slurp. With
a few posts, you can plan on the bots swinging by to pick up more
pages in your site. Cool, things are happening now!
Until Google
realizes people have programs doing auto-posts and auto-pings
and its not the most relevant or original content. Google wises
up (those still trying to get away with automated blogging and
pinging, youre wasting your time).
The link debates rage on; content is still king; and people want
rankings more than ever. Whats next?
1. RSS Feed You
can create content and send it out to the world to read with their
preferred viewer. What an opportunity to get your message out
there! You can also pull feeds into your site to bulk up content.
Amazing.
2. Enter the Press Release and Article Syndication. Brand spanking
new and dressed to impress. Fabulous write informative articles
and submit them around the internet the benefit is two-fold
each article will drive traffic to your site, and the links within
the article will count as links for your site!
The Press Release is killer too. Write an informative, keyword
rich press release and get it sent out to thousands of media outlets
online. You could count on 30 days worth of traffic from one release.
Not to mentioned, press releases get picked up in the News engines
and the regular engines too.
Great so whats the problem?
Any current hot technique is only a passing fad. We make sure
of that.
Look at most of the techniques that are now considered black
hat. They would have been OK long term and worked well in moderation,
but instead they are used and abused and killed by us. Thereby
sabotaging our own success.
Let me talk specifically about RSS Feeds, Press Releases and Articles.
RSS Feed is great. Pull in news that is relevant and comes from
different sources, showing different opinions. Fabulous! Use a
few feeds to enhance the already strong content on your site and
this tactic should remain beneficial long term.
However, what is really happening is people are saying Great, I
dont even have to write content; Ill just pull in feeds and bulk
up my site that way
Now you can imagine Google saying, OK these guys are abusing
this technique and trying to fool us too bad, no more RSS Feeds.
And those legitimate users are now suffering the loss of this fabulous
technique.
Even scarier is Article Syndication this one is accidentally
being misused and abused. People arent considering the future
for this technique, and the future for their site.
In order to understand the overuse and abuse, you need to understand
how it benefits you, and you need to understand the SPECIFICS
of what the engines look for.
Perception:
Articles provide
links to your site. Google likes links. Score!
Reality:
Google likes links
that go to various pages within your site, with varying
text used as the clickable part of your link (anchor
text or hotspot).
It is those specifics that people ignore. When you syndicate
an article, you send the exact same article to multiple
sources. That means each link goes to the same page on your
site, and has the same anchor text.
Not exactly what Google had in mind! Its only a matter of
time before Google starts dismissing links from articles as irrelevant.
Now:
Articles provide
a good source of content to enhance your sites existing
content.
The
Future:
Scraping (stealing
bits of content from sites through an automated software
and posting them to your site) is ruining articles. Google
had to develop a component in their algorithm that determines
how old content is, and who was the first publisher of it.
Therefore, articles will be seen as recycled and not original
content and of no value to you.
Even worse, if you syndicate an article that you wrote, you
are potentially losing the credit for that article -- unless you
quickly post it on your site, and wait until it is indexed so Google
knows it belongs to you, and then open it up for syndication. Since
article sites are so big and active, they are likely to be spidered
first and then the article site will get credit as the first source
to use the content and therefore the owner or creator.
Good:
Press Releases
are a great way to get news out, throw in some links and
you have built in link popularity with media sites, which
are typically high PR.
Not
Good:
People are sending
out press releases every time they make a move. Is it really
news worthy that you acquired a new client, or that you
completed a project? No, not really. Sadly, the real news
worthy items get lost in the mass numbers of press releases
floating around each and every day.
With a little bit of restraint and strategy, we could use these
to our benefit. Here
are the solutions ...
About the
Author
Jennifer Horowitz is Director of
Marketing for EcomBuffet.com. EcomBuffet.com has been in business
for 6 years, serving clients big and small and delivering
top rankings.
For more information, including the truth about common
SEO Myths, a free report, as well as details about
what you need to do to get the RESULTS you are looking
for contact us today.
