A big part of that is because over the last 10 years, what constitutes best practices in SEO has changed drastically. The changes are primarily due to the evolution of the Google PageRank algorithm, which is responsible for determining where a site gets listed in organic (not paid) search results for a given keyword or phrase. These are the kinds of rankings everyone craves because they are unpaid, and many would say they carry a higher level of credibility.
Over the next several weeks, we here at Galileo Tech Media plan to lay on you some of our rock-solid wisdom on SEO. It is one of our core competencies here, and it’s an area in which we’ve found many IHAs could use some guidance.
But before we get to talking about what you should be doing for SEO, we want to make sure you’re not doing anything to hurt your SEO cause…because if you haven’t revised your SEO strategy in a while, there is a really good chance you are doing things that at one time helped move you up the search rankings—but now, those very same things could be hurting you.
Let’s start with two SEO practices that have really attracted the stinkeye from Google: guest blogging and link building…
1. Irrelevant spammy guest blogging.
The key here is to draw a firm, thick line between what constitutes “spammy” guest blogging and what is good, relevant guest blogging, which is still a good thing for your website’s rankings when done authentically.
At issue is a practice engaged in by many companies who started offering blog owners money and other compensation for the opportunity to post on their blog. These blog posts would be chocked full of linkbacks to the company’s website(s), which were often irrelevant to the content of the actual blog. Nevertheless, they benefitted because of the high traffic the blog received. Matt Cutts, who runs WebSpam at Google, talks about the issue in much greater depth here: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/
But the moral of the story is…unless you can vouch for a guest blogger personally or know them well, don’t do guest blogging.
2. Outgoing and incoming link quality.
For a long time, links to or from your website boosted organic search rankings, and it didn’t matter so much where the linkbacks were from or where they were going, if they were outbound links from your website.
To build linkbacks, site owners would pay an SEO agency to build an online infrastructure that would create incoming links for their sites.
This used to work just fine, but not anymore. Now, such practices can destroy your website’s organic ranking if…
1. The linkback comes from a site that has been penalized by Google.
2. The linking site has low Domain Authority (http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority).
3. You rack up a large number of such linkbacks in a short period of time.
But don’t throw out the idea of link-building completely as an SEO tool. You just need to know how to do it without cheating (http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/06/18/a-cheat-sheet-for-building-high-ranking-authority-without-cheating/)!
So, there’s a little something for you to get started. We’ll chime in again shortly with some more thoughts on keyword-driven content and the practice of keyword stuffing, so stay tuned…