SEO -- What not to do?

rubch · Jan 29, 2012

I have an e-commerce site that is just now beginning to rank in the top 2 for very competitive keywords and starting to bring in meaningful traffic. As such, I'd like to strike a solid balance between further serp improvement on other keywords and safety, i.e. protecting the traffic that I have right now.

Below is a quick summary of what I'm doing:

1) e-commerce site -- plenty of relevant content; no keyword stuffing
2) automatic link building only with content -- I rely mainly on well spun, relevant articles, blog entries and social bookmarks for my links
3) scrapebox to help links get indexed -- right now, I use scrapebox runs to link to my first tier backlinks

Of the above strategies, I'm most concerned with the scrapebox blasts. Although I'm not using scrapebox to link directly to my money site, I'm not sure if one layer of separation is enough.

Questions:
1) I'd like to hear if anyone in this community has had experience with sites that have been penalized by Google, what might have caused the penalty, and how the penalty was removed (if in fact it was removed).

2) Also, if anyone has experienced any penalties using the strategy that I am currently using, please do share.

3) Would it be safer to use web 2.0 profile or forum profile links in lieu of or in front of the scrapebox blasts?

Scritty · Jan 29, 2012

All sites get slapped (well most). Young sites move around a lot (by young I mean less than 1 year)
Don't consider "this" or "that" with linking - do "both" and "more". Link variety is vital. One source alone will not work for any but the weakest niches.

The penalty is often simple that Google has decided that other sites have better conent than yours.
From March1st on site content (which has sxtreadily been an increasing factor in ranking) is moving up again. Read G%%gles new "terms and conditions" under "policies" URL.

Linking used to be maybe 75% of the search engines algorithms weighting, then after Panda it became maybe 66%, I think March 1st will see it at 50%. Still vital, but "g" is finding that fighting against link spamming is not proving cost effective enough. It's reached a ratio of "effort v result" - and the simplest thing to do (and the most obvious) is to devalue links and increase the value of LSI and unique site content.

Linking is (and will always be) vital, but it's not he beast it was even in 2010.
For some stupid fecking reason though, regularly updated content seems to do better than static, and in some niches that's just not appropriate at all - but no-one said G was perfect.

Eventually making a success in IM might be about writing enough completely new content to keep "x" number of sites fed..which will feck up the micro site guys who need to write 500x 300 word pieces every 2 or 3 days.

That's the way it's heading.
Your own site content is (in the long term) more important than links!
Shame - cause it's going to be really hard to game the system soon. It's all going to be about writing content, aged domains and "trust"

Scritty

rubch · Jan 29, 2012

Thanks, Scritty, for the detailed response. I certainly hear you on the increasing value of on page seo. As an e-commerce site, I'm not sure what else there is to do besides adding more and more products and product descriptions to increase the amount of unique content on site. Any suggestions on this front? We have a blog, where we can add a lot of written content, but the blog isn't our targeted landing page.

As for the links, variety has certainly helped in our serps -- variety in both sources of backlinks and the variety of the keywords that we use for backlinks -- we probably have 20-30 tier 3 and tier 2 keywords for every tier 1 keyword.

Thanks again for the input

swtor005 · Jan 29, 2012

Scritty said:
All sites get slapped (well most). Young sites move around a lot (by young I mean less than 1 year)
Don't consider "this" or "that" with linking - do "both" and "more". Link variety is vital. One source alone will not work for any but the weakest niches.

The penalty is often simple that Google has decided that other sites have better conent than yours.
From March1st on site content (which has sxtreadily been an increasing factor in ranking) is moving up again. Read G%%gles new "terms and conditions" under "policies" URL.

Linking used to be maybe 75% of the search engines algorithms weighting, then after Panda it became maybe 66%, I think March 1st will see it at 50%. Still vital, but "g" is finding that fighting against link spamming is not proving cost effective enough. It's reached a ratio of "effort v result" - and the simplest thing to do (and the most obvious) is to devalue links and increase the value of LSI and unique site content.

Linking is (and will always be) vital, but it's not he beast it was even in 2010.
For some stupid fecking reason though, regularly updated content seems to do better than static, and in some niches that's just not appropriate at all - but no-one said G was perfect.

Eventually making a success in IM might be about writing enough completely new content to keep "x" number of sites fed..which will feck up the micro site guys who need to write 500x 300 word pieces every 2 or 3 days.

That's the way it's heading.
Your own site content is (in the long term) more important than links!
Shame - cause it's going to be really hard to game the system soon. It's all going to be about writing content, aged domains and "trust"

Scritty

Great post and vision. Reminded me of someone very special person "Ken Giddens" just G you will know who he was. BHW forum was not there and more than 80% people right now on BHW were not even born in IM thing when I shared office with Ken.

Your vision keeps you in the game. Link building will remain in the picture and why not, but yes there will be a swing to on page SEO as mentioned in a very descriptive way by "Scritty"

Keep building links with variety and keep the good work on your website going you will be fine in long run.

I doubt if these big tools for mass backlinking [don't really feel like naming them, you all know them] will of any help in long run as G knows by now how they are being used from reliable sources like BHW etc etc.

Whats more important is how to add more content to money site without loosing focus

.

Good luck

JFoulds · Jan 29, 2012

Don't accidentally leave ScrapeBox blasting your money site directly for 48 hours on a VPS after forgetting to stop your test.
Accidentally built ~25,000 links to a day old registered domain, learnt that the hard way. -_-

SEO -- What not to do?

rubch

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Scritty

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rubch

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swtor005

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JFoulds

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