SEO Tips Gone Bad
I spend way too much time reading other blogs and seeing what they have to offer. In doing this I have noticed a trend that could have some bad consequences for inexperienced web users that I think should be noted.
I have come across many blogs about making money online and how to optimize your site for search engines in order to attain higher rankings. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is big business right now and it seems everyone is trying to find ways to get their page viewed by as many people as possible. SEO sites seem to be the worst offenders when it comes to unresearched, inaccurate information. What I see many of these sites doing is posting ways to get increased page rankings by using unethical internet practices. People are going to these sites unaware that many of the “tips” for higher search engine rankings are actually frowned upon by Google, Technorati, Yahoo!, and others.
One of the more common tips I see is related to using altered anchor text in your post titles. Anchor text is great if it is related to what you are actually writing about. It is important to know that Google and others use anchor text to index your posts for keyword searches but the problem comes in when you add irrelevant anchor text to your posts to gain rankings. For example, if you wrote a post on dog grooming, your anchor text would probably be (and should be):
www.yourwebsite.com/articles/dog-grooming (or something like that)
Google would likely index this article under “dog-grooming”. A trick with anchor text that will get you higher rankings is to add other words to your anchor text that are frequently searched. For example:
www.yourwebsite.com/articles/dog-grooming-making-money-online
Google would index this post much differently based on the anchor text. I do not recommend using this technique. It may result in higher rankings because people may come across your dog grooming post while searching for “making money online” but it can also result in Google banning you from their search engine. This technique is known as “Google Bombing” which is defined as, “The practice of using anchor text to make a page show up in the SERPs under keywords that are out of context for that page..” (from Search Engine Dictionary)
My advice is to stick with reading the sites of people who actually know what they are talking about. People like Jeremy Shoemaker and Darren Rowse. (There are many others but I recommend these as a good start.)
Be careful who you listen to!
