Avoid the Mistakes New SEOs Make – Using the Google Link Command to Analyze Links

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Google does not show inbound link data for any domains. The data is limited and distorted to prevent search engine optimizers from knowing too much. If you want to get link data on a domain use:

• Yahoo Site Explorer
• Yahoo Search’s “linkdomain” command
• Majestic SEO
• Linkscape
• Live Search “link” and “linkdomain” commands

Stressing About Duplicate Content Too Much

Duplicate content is evil, but it all depends on the type of content you have. For example, an ecommerce website with database listings and tracking IDs has to worry about duplicate content, since the database can produce hundreds of duplicates for hundreds of pages.

If, on the other hand, somewhere on your site you have two duplicate pages, it will not affect your rankings. Duplicate content really hurts when it’s on a massive scale, not when you have couple of duplicate pages on a 100-page website. Don’t spend too much time worrying about duplicates if you have a relatively small static website (check it once in a while). Worry about it if you have a shopping cart or a database.

Using Robot TXT Exclusion Instead of No Follow to Block Link Juice

If you’re doing page rank sculpting and excluding some pages from getting the juice (like terms of use, privacy, etc), you MUST use the nofollow tag. A page excluded in the robot.txt file will not be accessed by the Googlebot, but it will still receive link power. To block link juice flow, always use nofollow (note the no follow must be applied to all the links that point to the page you want to exclude).

Ignoring Other Search Engines

I am guilty as hell on this one. In fact I get paranoid about it. What if I focus on Yahoo and my rankings drop on Google? This is the biggest fear that stops people from optimizing for anything other than Google, and it is understandable… what if rankings do drop…..?)

Yahoo and Live still hold around 30 percent of the search engine market, and have good quality traffic, so consider optimizing for them. They don’t have a sandbox effect, and still count directory and sitewide links better than Google. Just make sure your rankings don’t drop on Google ).

Author: Ivan Strouchliak

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