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I spent last five years researching how to improve my site’s search engine positions without interfering with experience of my visitors. Perhaps I haven’t figured out what should I do, but now I definitely know what techniques to avoid

The first and most important thing to keep in mind when you start thinking about ways to optimize your pages is that you’re building pages for your visitors, not search engines. Techniques described bellow will interfere with your users experience and (in most cases) will result in disappearance of you sites from SERP’s.

Bad navigation

Your website must have clean and simple navigation. This way you ensure that Googlebot is able to crawl your entire site. Navigation links should be located near the top of the pages since this makes it easy for your visitors and Googlebot to navigate through your site. Best bet for navigation is use of text links, as this increases word count and keyword density, as well as giving description of destination page to Googlebot. Googlebot is also able to follow image links and from recently Flash navigation links. If you use image links make sure you add some description in ALT attribute of image tag to describe your link.

Keyword stuffing in image ALT text

Some webmaster and optimizers still believe that inserting dozens of keywords or keyphrases in image ALT text will improve their search engine rankings. Well, this is wrong since search engines are able to detect this technique and they now almost completely ignore ALT text.

This is definitely one of the ugliest SEO techniques. You may ask, “Why is this so bad when only search engines are able to see this text?”. Just imagine how people with disabilities feel when their screen readers stumble reading dozens or even hundreds of keywords describing your image. In addition, your site will look very ugly in text-only browser like Lynx.

On the other hand, few very well chosen words to describe your images will improve your user’s experience and may even slightly improve your search engine rankings.

JavaScript links

Googlebot is not able (currently) to follow JavaScript links. People often use these type of links for fancy navigation. If you use them just make sure you have alternative navigation using HTML links.

Hidden text

Googlebot and other robots learned to recognize this method several years ago. So if you don’t want to be identified as spammer and banned from SERP’s, don’t use this method. Like with keyword stuffing in image ALT tags, this technique will create nightmare for users with disabilities who use screen readers.

Hidden links

Number of incoming links to certain page has direct effect to Google PageRank (PR). However, if those are hidden that may produce similar results as with hidden text.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a search engine optimization method where you serve highly optimized page version to robots and a regular page to your visitors. Official Google policy is that cloaked pages are not allowed in their index. However, there are many websites that use cloaking with great success. So if you like to risk getting banned from SERP’s you may use this method, just make sure you do it properly.

Guest book spamming and FFA pages

Adding your link to hundreds of guest books will not help you with your PR, since it appears that Google is able to detect them and ignores outgoing links completely. This way you’ll save yourself many hours of useless work. When PR was initially introduced, many SEO companies were offering to “submit your site to zillion FFA pages for free” and hopefully increase your PR. I don’t remember that this used to work at time and it certainly doesn’t work now. If you find any of these, avoid them.

Sessions

Google is not able to accept session cookies and will try avoiding URL based sessions. Also, you should use fewer parameters in you dynamic URLs and avoid use “id” parameter as Googlebot may think that is session ID.

General rule for all serch engines

When you’re planning to use some technique and you believe that it looks spammy, then it probably is spammy

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 7:44 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.