Thread: The most common SEO mistakes you need to avoid

Originally Posted by Natural Elements

Loading time was a SEO factor long time ago. I don't know if Google includes this factor on the algorithm now or in the future, but it seems logical.

I am not sure where you are getting this from. I've been doing SEO since 1997 and last year was the first time that Google even hinted that loading time might become a factor in 2010. There is no evidence to support any claim that it has been a factor for a long time. Just because it seems logical, does not mean it has been a factor.

Sure, poorly coded web sites with bloated code has always been a factor, but that is just because the spiders cannot read the content. If they cannot read the content, there isn't anything to index, but that has nothing to do with loading times being a factor.

I fully agree that it should be a factor, just to eliminate all of the crappy sites with too many bells and whistles. I can think of a lot of news sites that may suffer a bit if load times become a factor. I get tired of waiting for a page to load 50 different advertisements.

Originally Posted by Loko

First time I see such an extensive list of possible ranking factors. Very interesting!

The Vaughns checklist has been around for along time. It was one of the first SEO checklists, but it does not mention loading time as a factor.

There are quote a few SEO checklists that are more extensive than the Vaughns list. Some were done by teams of SEO professionals. If I can remember where they are, I will post a few.

@TopDogger,
Were you a Mosaic, Cello, Netscaper, IE fan when you started Mosaic for me...though it was far behind my addiction to MUDS at the time...both were distractors from programming...

Diff note, I like the changes to Webmaster tools on load times. Finally took the time to look the other day and was able to remove quite a bit of "bloated" scripting from a site...though it still fails several of the tests from the O'Reilly link you posted.

Cheers,
James

Nice tips!!! I love reading your blog. That's why I bookmarked the same.

Originally Posted by javanx3d

@TopDogger,
Were you a Mosaic, Cello, Netscaper, IE fan when you started Mosaic for me...though it was far behind my addiction to MUDS at the time...both were distractors from programming...

Netscape was already on the scene when I started playing with the web. I started with Netscape 1.0 (1994). Mosaic was the best option prior to that.

I think that reducing load times is always a good thing. In addition to teaching SEO, I teach in-house web development teams how to improve loading and rendering times. I do still find web sites with bloated 1.5 meg home pages and web development teams that do not understand that the home page load time for any rural customer on a dial up-connection is greater than 5 minutes when pages get that large. Yes, about 8% to 10% of USA users still use dial-ups. They are mostly casual users and people in rural areas that do not have other options.

That's cool. My only time in your neck of the woods was the Web3D conference in 2001/2002 in Tempe.

I probably violate load times on many of my sites, so that's a point of emphasis for me this CY to work on...not really for SEO but more of thinking on the usability lines of thought.

@TopDogger

Well like I said it seemed logical long time ago because when I create my e-commerce that's what decided me to switch from dial-up to high speed connection. In 2005 much more people were in dial up and to optimize the chance to sell and keep people on the site, all the pages needed to load as fast as possible with minimum weight.

Now I can tell you that this factor is important but not as before because people have much faster connection.

That's why it was an important factor to load page fast. Do you remember to go away when surfing on internet because the page load took for ever to load? Can you imagine to go back in dial up today and wait before a page load? Beside, the coding made some huge improvement with css files.

Anyway that's why I said this on my prior post

Hi,

@TopDogger

You are so right about people making pages to heavy. My connection is all in if the weather is good, or my location. I have had downs at only 11kb. ups at 8kb

I bounce fast is the page takes to long to load.

I like squidoo but some pages are way to long and take forever to load.

Which brings me to this SEO question. What is the difference between a doorway page and a squidoo lens?

Sami

Thanks for your sharing.

I think the most common mistake for a beginner would be targeting wrong keywords or trying to rank for hot competitive keywords at the very beginning of a new site. Or, how to use keywords and their variants more effectively would be another big problem.

All the best,

Originally Posted by airforce1

I think the most common mistake for a beginner would be targeting wrong keywords or trying to rank for hot competitive keywords at the very beginning of a new site. Or, how to use keywords and their variants more effectively would be another big problem.

Trying to rank for competitive keywords at the very beginning of a new site is fine as long as the budget is there to target the keywords. You are still building links even though it will take longer to rank.

But you are right that this is a common SEO mistake by people with McDonald budgets that want to eat filet mignon.

Originally Posted by Natural Elements

That's why it was an important factor to load page fast. Do you remember to go away when surfing on internet because the page load took for ever to load? Can you imagine to go back in dial up today and wait before a page load? Beside, the coding made some huge improvement with css files.

I was working with the web when everyone except large corporations was on dial-ups. At that time, the upper limit for page weight was 60k if you wanted the page to load in 10 seconds or less for dial-up users. We eliminated every byte in scripts to help assure that pages loaded faster. At that time, we even eliminated the quotes around numeric tag attribute values. The biggest problem in the 1990s was that we were stuck using tables, which required a lot of code.

Originally Posted by Sami4u

I like squidoo but some pages are way to long and take forever to load.

Which brings me to this SEO question. What is the difference between a doorway page and a squidoo lens?

Sami

I don't work with squidoo, but a doorway page is always within a site and is typically stuffed with keywords. Doorway pages were used in ancient times to help a site rank well with search engines. They were built for search engines, and not necessarily for users. Sometimes a site would have 100 doorway pages. Each used similar content with different HTML title tags, meta tags, heading tags, alt attributes, etc., to focus each page on a different keyword theme. Doorway pages did not use unique content. Duplicate content was not a negative factor back then.

I attended one of the first Search Engine Strategies conferences many years ago (I think it was around 1998 or 1999). That year, doorway pages were pushed as the best way for a site to rank well for a range of keywords. The next year, all of the search engines were penalizing doorway pages and everyone was ripping them out of their sites.

Some SEO software, such as WebPosition Gold, was originally popular because it generated doorway pages. Before Google became popular (it was the first search engine to analyze content), people used to submit every page in their sites to search engines, sometimes on a weekly or monthly basis. That became the first form of "spamming" the search engines. Doorway pages were generally NOT found on menus or areas where users could normally access them. They were therefore submitted to search engines or tied to the rest of the site using hidden links.

Are you beginning to see how a lot of search engine penalties got their start? What was considered to be normal and acceptable SEO in the 1990s would create a lot of serious SEO mistakes and penalties today.