SEO and Ecommerce 3: Things to Avoid
Being the King
Everyone wants to be the king (or queen). They want to make it to the top right away. And if they can do it without too much hard work, then that's even better. Unfortunately, we know that's not the way it works. There are no shortcuts to success: No matter what it might say on the package, what's inside probably won't deliver the results that it promises.
The following are some link-building tactics that you will no doubt see a lot of advertising for or hear people talk about on message board, but which are ultimately not worth the time, energy, money, and aggravation associated with them:
Directories
On the surface, directories seem like a good idea: a page full of all sorts of different sites all about the same thing, which users can browse through to find sites that will give them what they want. In reality, too many of them are poorly optimized, cluttered, and ultimately your link will just end up getting lost in the fray. What's more, directory lists often charge for placement, making the poor results all the more frustrating.
Buying Links
Google and other search engines know who is selling links and who is buying them. While there is nothing illegal about this practice, like all the other methods on this list, the links are not organic. The link is not appearing on the Web because people have given your site the "thumbs up," and care about what you do. The link is there because you paid for it, and with the diminished value that search engines will assign to it, the chances of you making your money back on the investment are slim indeed.
SPAM
Spam initially referred to emails sent out by robots to humans who didn't really want to receive them. They usually contained advertising for various products and occasionally scams. The marketing idea was the same a shotgun: Fire in a wide enough area and you'll probably hit something. Even with an infinitesimally small return, spammers sent out enough messages to get some kind of profit out of it.
Spam for SEO includes email, blog posts, and forum posts. Blogs and forums are riddled with users logging on to post something that doesn't make any sense in a comment field and include a link back to their site. This works against you in two ways: First, you annoy the other users on the blog, eroding your credibility in that arena. Secondly, this eroded credibility infects your link/site and users who have seen your spammy posts avoid you and your site.
Conflict
For a while it was believed that links of any kind, good or bad, still improved a site's traffic rankings. While this may (or may not) have been true at one point in the past, Google and other search engines have made adjustments to their algorithms to weed out negative posts and complaints and only rank sites for "good" links.
This strategy was made famous in America most recently with the "Decor My Eyes" scandal, wherein a belligerent marketer/entrepreneur had built his business model on providing the worst possible customer service and even threatening disatisfied customers. He bragged to the New York Times that his offensive practices had resulted in links to his site appearing on numerous high-ranking websites, the result of which, he claimed, put him high up on Google's search results. He was later arrested for various counts of fraud and making threats.