Stop Doing SEO Tricks

Stop Doing SEO Tricks

Hi everybody! My name is Ruth Burr and I’m the new Lead SEO here at SEOmoz. I’m super excited to be here! I’ll be posting on SEO here regularly going forward, but for my first post I wanted to tell you guys that when it comes to SEO, this is how I roll:

I know a woman who’s recently lost about 30 pounds. She looks great, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone compliment her on her new look and then ask, “What’s your secret?” “Just eating right and exercising,” she replies – and their faces invariably fall. Eating right and exercising? BO-RING! Sounds hard!.Stop Doing SEO Tricks

The truth is, we’re all looking for shortcuts to help us get the results we want without putting in the work we need to do to achieve them (think about the “1 Weird Old Trick” ads you see everywhere). We step on the scale, think about the hard low-cal high-cardio road ahead, and think, “Surely there’s a better/faster/easier way to do this.”

SEOs do this all the time. We want that magic bullet to get our sites to the top of the SERPs, the one “secret trick” to get the edge on our competitors. And just like fad diets, a lot of secret/sneaky SEO tricks do work for a while. When I started doing SEO in 2006, one of my tasks was to go into our older blog posts and bold or un-bold various keywords, so the content would update and be seen as “fresh.” And you know what? It worked for a while. Remember Page Rank sculpting? TOTALLY worked for a while. Remember directory submissions and blog comment spamming for links? Of course you do, because they are still going on.


Weaning Ourselves Off of Short-Term Gains

Look, I get it, guys. It’s so easy to adopt SEO tricks, and when they actually WORK it can be incredibly hard to turn them down. If all of your competitors are outranking you thanks to their huge volume of paid/spammy links, the moral high ground’s not gonna put food on the table, amirite? So I feel ya. The “if it works I’m doing it, regardless of whether or not it follows the guidelines or is a good user experience” approach has gotten some serious short-term gains for some people (to my continuing chagrin – for more on this topic, see Wil Reynolds’ post How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO). Regardless of my personal feelings on whether or not they’re good for the Internet, I’m not going to say tricks don’t ever work.

The problem with SEO tricks is that they’re about getting a site to the top of the SERPs regardless of whether it deserves to be there. That’s the kind of trick that search engines have a vested interest in continuing to combat, which leads to algorithmic updates like Penguin. Over-reliance on SEO tricks is what causes your rankings and traffic to be completely wiped out

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