What's the worst SEO mistake you ever done?

Hi...

What's the worst SEO mistake you ever done?
I heard few already. Just curious to hear what other did and regret about it ...

Best!

Guy.

 

I havent made any mistakes that hurt real bad, just learned alot and had to re-do stuff. I used gotlinks once for a few weeks till I found DP, then removed it. Luckily the sites I put it on were new and didn't get cached then.

 

When I first submitted to paid directories, I didn't know that the anchor mattered. At the time, I thought it was just important that you had a lot of sites linking to you. So, I used titles that were not of any help to me.

 

My worst SEO error? spending 10 years in the industry developing natural search engineering skills and then helping a "so called friend", who was selling salsa to start an SEO business based on my knowledge. I even closed their first two blue Chip deals for them. Then for him to say that I was only ever a Sub Contractor. When they are using my website design, my process etc.

That was the worst mistake. Should have left them spamming search engines.

 

The worse (and only real) mistake was to have two domain names pointing to the same folder on my server. All went well, until one day google decided to split the pages between the two domain names. Half of the pages were indexed under one domain name, the other half on the second domain. Because of the screwed navigation structure loss, both fragmented versions dropped like stones from the SERP's. I then 301'd one site to the other, and within weeks all was back to normal with the traffic pouring in again !

The second biggest was doing the work and getting paid afterwards, There are some bad uns out there, which is why payment is now mostly up front.

 

"Old Bald & Stupid"

Should be "Older receeded & wise!"

 

Not starting earlier!

 

i think i have the folder problem

 

You also have the solution then.

They say 'we learn by our mistakes' I say, ' better to learn from the mistakes of others '

 

Biggest mistake: spending ages SEOing on other peoples sites without developing my own. I spent 2+ years SEOing other peoples sites and never thought to create my own - DOH.
When I think of the money I missed.

 

Failing to understand the importance of anchor text (this was a while ago) - did exactly the same as i'm sure many people and just put any old rubbish in when I was submitting to directories...

 

Naively believing overture data and build a site that receives no traffic. Ranked no 3 from over 9 million pages and see no visitor.

That mistake has made me wiser.

 

When I entered a site of mine into the "Seraphim Proudleduck" Competition, I decided it would be a great idea to throw up a page of lorem ipsum on the site, with a search and replace for my desired terms. I was #2 at the time of doing that.

Now, that site is still *very* heavily sandboxed/penalised... It sucks, because it dominates all in Yahoo and MSN, I just don't have the time to work on a site that won't perform in the big G.

 

My 2 biggest mistakes:
1. Being lazy for long periods of time. Hard work always pays off.
2. Not making sites because of moral reasoning. Example: I hate drugs, but I finally got over it, made an online pharmacy and got the first sale in the first week since the site release.

 

I kind of regret using coop on sites I could have easily gotten ranks for without it

because now they are gone in yahoo

 

paid links

 

Placing the text link of an advertiser who was banned by Google. It was my first time selling a text link and I didn't know any better. I was fortunate Google didn't nail me for it. I read abou the dangers of linking to a bad site in an seo book, and I haven't made that mistake again.

 

My biggest were not necessarily seo related.. but I had some very good domains a long time ago... and let them go.. If I had known... one of them was a 3 letter word that would have been useful to have now.

Had a few other domains I wish I had kept as well....

 

Not doing more seo right from the start, example: no anchor in directory submissions. I also think that mistakes are the best way to learn.