Here's a list of the worst seo practices to avoid: reciprocal link trading (with sites unrelated to your sites niche/content), free-for-all link exchanges, and other bottom feeder links - not effective page onload redirects - risky, but some do well with it short term link renting - effective if you are creative interlinking many small sites ( to gain popularity - easy to leave footprints unless it is done well keyword stuffing and hidden text either on or off the page - not effective unless intent looks legitimate cloaking - effective until they catch it automated content generation - depends on intent cross site scripting errors - effective short term, but usually solved quickly *If you dont agree with any of the listed above, please give your wise comments about it. **If you feel like you have to add more to the list, please do so ***More: http://www.seotier.com/23/seo-worst-practice-manual/
Some good stuff you got in there. One point I'd like to bring up though is the fact that you mentioned reciprocal link trading as your #1 worst practice. Maybe I took it wrong, but from my point of view if you can find a site that offers content similar to yours I see no harm in the both of you trading links. I would think search engines incourage this? Am I correct or wrong.
Hi ibnusad, Good list, I do agree with all your points except I thought the same as tenfourstudios when it came to reciprocal linking, can you give some more information on why this is a bad SEO practice. Thank you abc1234.
As per above commenters, I'd question the recip. linking part, but I'd also question the cross linking sites as well, after all this is the very same tactic blog networks such as Weblogs Inc, b5media, Gawker, 451 and others use with a lot of success, sure you leave footprints but if you aren't inulging in the dark arts (grey hat and below) I don't see any problem with this...if a link farm is good for them it should be good for others as well
good list.....recip links are easily detected and are worth nothing...do it for traffic not for SEO. the blog sites can do it because they are not on the same class C IP address. usually when a user registers a number of small sites from a single host they are on the same class C IP range.
what would you call automated content generation? thinks like RSS feeds? and if so, why would that be bad ?
What I meant by reciprocal link is exchanging links with sites unrelated to your sites content/niche As oseymour has said, "the blog sites can do it because they are not on the same class C IP address" If you are making a site that relies 100% from RSS Feeds, you're basically making a site with FULL of duplicate contents and this will lower your SERPS
Nice list and comments but i will not agree to comments about linking your sites. I did this for a 2+ year old PR6 site which can be considered as authority site somehow. Put links to 10 sites (one science site, 8 subdomains of science site and another site) on my authority site in sitewide way(thousands of hig PRed indexed pages). At the end, 9 sites obtained PR5 and 1 site became PR4 (There were not much content on this one. I guess this was the reason to obtain only PR4.). I did not buy/trade links on other sites to obtain this result. So this is basically the result of placing links on my authority site. I guess, the key here is having a common word in the domain and in fact having all the site is based on the same concept. (e.g. niche1-keyword.com, niche2-keyword.com...) All sites are on my dedicated server so sharing the same ip. 2 pagerank updates passed and i did not see any negative effect because of this. So in my opinion, building network of sites is acceptable if ... - basically i am not sure what is needed but - having shared keywords in the domain names may help - having one authority site may hep - having some coceptual relation may help although the sites are mostly unrelated in terms of main topic - if a human reviewer from google saw those sites, having quality sites (not MFA sites) may help. I dont want to give the site urls but i guess i managed to describe what i did. Let me know your thoughts..
I practice some of them - linking to unrelated sites on my links page - just for traffic not SEO. Will this result in penalties for my overall site though?
My view is that there is nothing wrong with reciprocal link trading if properly done. I would think so and would request "damaging" backlinks to be removed.
what about link trades that are a system of trading more complicated than exchanging links with one site. by this I mean I link to site A they link to B they Link to C they link to D and D links to me. All related content, are these circles detectable?
Yes, I would think this is detectable, but probably not something they are going to penalize. I mean look at Digg, thats basically what they do: send out a bunch of links, and in return get a bunch of incoming links from users who want to get their story dugg.
Hmm.. I don't think this is detectable. I mean in the programmer's point of view, this task will be really tedious. Let alone, I don't think that this is illegal. What I mean is, Google actually lives by crawling and collecting Data. This link structure actually helps Google and other Search engines to do their work better. Don't you think so?