The Worst Advice We've Ever Heard About seo

Over the years I’ve heard a lot of bad SEO advice ranging from keyword stuffing and link automation to cloaking and injections – I once overheard a couple of ‘gurus’ talking about the opportunity around php vulnerabilities at a local Starbucks. It’s pretty difficult to narrow down but for the purpose of this post I’ll focus on three little tidbits that while not necessarily blackhat, are still misconceptions to avoid.
1) 301 redirecting entire domains  I can’t count how many times I’ve heard the “buy aged domains and redirect them” schpeel. If you’re looking for a quick way to waste a valuable asset, this is a sure-fire tactic to engage in. Matt Cutts has already clarified that granular, page-page redirects are more effective at passing page rank. Rather than redirecting an entire domain, redirect pages on that domain to the pages on your main site that are relevant to that content.
This way, you maximize the benefit you get from the aged domain. If the aged domain has no content, it’s more worthwhile to create content for that domain, allow those pages to develop PA or PR and then redirect them to the appropriate page on your ‘money site.’
2) Noindexing Category Pages on WordPress I’ve heard this one a few times as well – that category pages aren’t useful and should be no indexed. Category pages allow people to discover content topically and can often be found in search results. To demonstrate:
That’s a keyword that has 880 monthly searches.
The argument supporting the noindexing of category pages is that these pages may be considered duplicate content as they contain verbatim excerpts from actual posts, but Search Engines are smart enough to distinguish between category pages and duplicate content, and with enough published content on your site your category pages should all be relatively unique. In my time as a marketer I’ve yet to see any correlation between Panda penalties and indexable category pages.
What I have seen are a number of sites getting upwards of 20% of organic entrances to category pages. Take it one step further, in analyzing traffic for 3 different blog properties over a period of 12 months, users who entered through category pages had higher pages/session metrics than users who landed directly on a post. Correlation is not causation but check these metrics out on your own sites and see what the numbers tell you!
3) Emulating Competitors as an Holistic Strategy Don’t get me wrong – competitive analysis is important, and often you can achieve a lot of quick wins by simply looking at what competitors are doing. But it’s important not to get into the mindset that duplicating your competitor’s link profile will allow you to rank as effectively as they do. When link building one of the strategies that should be at the forefront of achieving your goals is to develop links and relationships that your competitors can’t emulate.
So the implication here is not that you shouldn’t look to your competitors for ideas or opportunities, but that you should work on creating a link profile unique to you that others couldn’t turn around and copy.

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