Worst SEO Advice?

[Randy]

We see a lot of threads here about what the best SEO tips you've ever gotten are and stuff, but you can learn from mistakes too.

So what's the worst SEO advice you've ever gotten?

Did you take the advice?

What happened?

[kaus]

For me almost everything has been positive advice which everyone knows but I will say it again .... I am grateful for.

I did go to one of the webmaster forums and started reading posts. This was after joining PAW. Anyway it was how to get your site ranking in the serps's and the mod of that forum told the guy to go and spam as many forums as he could. I have been trying to find the link to that one. Needless to say reading that you KNOW you are in the wrong place.

I have been given little tips here and there nothing major but they dont sound right. if it doesnt jive the right way than it probably isnt something I should be doing.

I stay away from most of those forums now. Its really awful when someone who is actually doing a paid service for a client is asking for advice on htags and what they are or when someone dishes out info to everyone else who is supposed to be some kind of authority figure and "I" know they are wrong. to much confusion in those rooms....so I stick with PAW and members blogs

[Notspot]

As Kaus said most advice you get is great - there are some very generous people out there sharing their knowledge....but....

I was once told that google sees 'name' / 'target' tags (you know, where you put a link on a page to a specific portion of a page as a quick shortcut) as a separate page and so it will consider any page where you've used it as duplicate content.

eg: href="thispage.html" would be seen as a different URL to href="thispage#thisimportantbit", so G would think there are 2 versions of 'thispage', hence dup. content.

I got into a real tizz about it 'cos I use them really often. Spent hours researching it and ending up posting on the google webmaster boards. Needless to say - it's complete rubbish.

[ThePokerBank]

I've never actually received any bad advice. I have had heard conflicting opinions on the value of buying links, but never any real bad advice.

[PokerProp]

Most of the bad SEO advice I got was from 1998-2002. It would all seems so silly now to even list them because most of it is so obviously bad at this point / much was not as bad back then - but some of it still was.

[GregK]

luckily, I don't take anyones advice on anything lol

where do I start? errr...
doorway pages, cloaking scripts, hidden text, 100 lines of rubbish keywords at the bottom of each page (still see this occasionally), bunch of 1x1 pix img tricks, FFA farms, link farms, seen it all pretty much!

The SEO industry is a f'kin joke nowadays.
I've posted my Yak fur coat example too many times, so I'll leave it at that.

[chane]

Originally Posted by PokerProp

Most of the bad SEO advice I got was from 1998-2002. It would all seems so silly now to even list them because most of it is so obviously bad at this point / much was not as bad back then - but some of it still was.

Almost exactly the same for me. Back then I was submitting to link farms and search engines like crazy. Not to mention FFA sites and those special email lists where you get to submit an ad and then you receive about 2000 emails from other people submitting ads. I forget what they are called.

It's embarrassing to think about how dumb I was back then. My SEO & marketing skills are top notch now. OK, well, they are much better and I continue to learn everyday. I still make mistakes, but not as bad as the time wasting mistakes I made 5-7 years ago.

[mikebrad]

keyword stuffing inside of "noscript" tags

[GregK]

never thought of noscripts? had always used comments

[mikebrad]

comments?

Did that work? It seems like the noscript thing worked for a few weeks, lol