SEO Mistakes

After the recent Google Page Rank update, I have realised some search engine optimisation (or optimization for you Americans :P) mistakes I’ve made which have "hurt" my site in terms of potential Page Rank gain (or lack of) and also Page Rank loss. And also a friend made..

One critical issue I in particular want to write about is site wide links: they DO hurt both sites. However, quite possibly this depends upon the age and/or authority of the site, as there are many sites out there which seem to go unpenalised for incoming and/or outgoing site wide links.

What I noticed was: Site A went from PR2 to PR0 despite some link-building I had done. What had changed that is of great significance since the last update? Incoming and Outgoing site wide links. Site A was linking to a fairly new, Page Rank 0 site - let’s call it Site B. To make matters worse, these site wide links were reciprocated by Site B. Site B had a predicted Page Rank of 4, however it only manage 1 despite numerous back-links ranging from page rank 2-5.

As for my friend’s site (let’s call it Site C), it lost significant Page Rank (from a 5 to a 4) despite having done some one-way link building. However, there were two factors which most likely led to the drop: incoming links from so-called "tags pages" (which are basically link farms and don’t provide any value due to a large amount of out-bound links) and numerous site wide footer links.

I happened to also make the same mistake with tags pages… although they had previously been a benefit, it seems Google has wizened up over the past couple of updates. And thankfully, my blog only gained in rank this time (rather than drop, like in January) to 4 - it was previously a 3.

Site wide links and tag pages all go on my list of "mistakes not to make again"… let’s just hope I remember!