5 SEO Techniques Buried With 2007 4
In 2007, alot happened in the world of search engine marketing. Several strategies were born and met their fate last year. Some of these strategies were eighty-sixed because they provided unfair leverage within the search engines and made websites appear to be of more worth than they were.
1. Directory Links – Google pretty much stripped away all the value gained from one-way and reciprocal links that were achieved by directory submissions. PageRank dropped, and so did link value. Now, directory listings are close to good for nothing.
2. Reciprocal Links – Anyone who actively pursued link exchanges as their main source of backlinks felt the wrath of Google as they stripped PageRank of websites who did not have a good ratio of reciprocal links to one way natural links.
3. Text Link Brokers – Companies like Text Link Ads thought they were going to be the next big hit, but as they were starting to grow, their very foundations were shook when Google applied penalties to the SERP’s of many websites. Now text link brokers have gone underground, and carefully swap their goods in 2008.
4. Sponsored Blog Posts – Many websites who were using sites like Smorty, ReviewMe, and PayPerPost as a main way to drive revenue to their blog experienced PageRank and search engine ranking position penalties as well, now bloggers using these paid to post networks have to disguise their paid blog posts to look more legitimate to search engines.
5. Subdomain Supremacy – Many networks (and also spam blogs) utilized this handy SEO technique to leverage search engine spiders’ mechanics by adding many keyword rich subdomains onto the main domain. Google swiftly amended this problem by allowing no more than two subdomain results from a single domain to appear in the search results for a given keyword. This hasn’t fully been worked out as some search queries still return more than that.
I started blogging in August of 2007. I sure could have used this post at that time. I am slowly discovering all of the “do,” “don’t do,” “you can but you’ll be penalized,” etc. I just wanted to blog, I had no idea that all of these SEO issues would affect me.
Well, I’m six months in and I’ve learned enough to stay out of trouble. At least I now have resources such as this blog to help me before I cross some invisible forbidden line.
I couldn’t agree with you more about the link directories. I am guilty of most of this and have a (niche related) directory on my site. I’ve been steadily losing pagerank. But I am also steadily gaining first page results for my keywords. Strange, huh!
Pretty interesting post. I’ve added you to my daily drop entrecard list. I look forward to reading what you have to say in the futre
Good point! Some of these might still be useable, people just have to be aware that they do weigh as much anymore.