Bad SEO Habits

Found at: http://www.mymotech.com/bad-seo-habits/

Occasionally, I will highlight company’s web sites that are doing things well, but usually it is a lot more fun to highlight a corporation that is doing things wrong. Wrong might be right sometimes, but here is what Google calls a bad idea:

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don’t send automated queries to Google.
* Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
* Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

The thing to keep in mind is that there are some really really competitive areas of search on the internet. Generally, that competition only gets fiercer the more money is involved. For this reason, Banking and finance terms like “second mortgage” are extremely costly keywords averaging between five and seven dollars on Yahoo Search Marketing. With acquisition costs that high you had better spend some money on organic optimization.

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Well, Ditech.com did spend some time and perhaps money. The problem is they came up with a search engine no no in the process. If you did a Google search for home equity loan they are the 3rd result and 2nd company. Great Right? Well, not really, because they are engaging in some questionable optimization practices. If you disable JavaScript (I prefer to use the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox) in your browser suddenly you will see a paragraph of text that is not visible when you normally visit the page.

Home Loans - Home Equity Loans
Home Equity Loans

Home Loans: ditech.com is known as being a leader in the direct home equity loans industry.

If you are looking for home loans Ditech can help you. We specialize in home equity loans.

Ditech makes home equity loans quick and easy to understand. You won’t get any surprises with our home loans.

Well, how about that? They managed to mention the phrases “home equity loans” five times and “home loans” four times all without the casual web site visitor being able to see this sad excuse for copy. Not to mention, there is an H1 tag and H2 tag a link back to Ditech with the anchor text “home equity loans”. I guarantee that this was done by an SEO. Unfortunately, for Ditech and their SEO they are doing things wrong and eventually they will get axed because of it. (Most likely they will get deranked for a while till they fix what is wrong.) Or maybe nothing will happen and they will continue to enjoy high rankings with less than desirable tactics.

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