SEO

Among the search engine industry is the relatively new concept of negative SEO. I don’t see the techniques associated with negative SEO as anything new; now they just have a name. Most of the conversations about negative SEO discuss a third party interfering with your SEO efforts but is not damaging your own SEO efforts also a form of negative SEO?

Negative SEO Through Frames

I had been taught that using frames to create webpages would hurt search engine optimization before I even learned how to program a site using frames. Why learn how to do something that was bad?

I was introduced to programming with frames as part of the one HTML class I have taken and I quickly saw why so many people were/are using them - they make managing a site quick and easy. But, are the benefits of using frames worth the negative SEO results?

Now let’s look at the SEO questions you should ask before using frames.

Thanks to Google, there’s a page on one of my websites that constantly is in the top 10, if not #1 for phrase x; and Google handed me that phrase on a silver platter! I didn’t have to spend hours researching keywords and search phrases. I didn’t have to mess with Google Analytics. And I didn’t have to pay a dime for an Adwords campaign.

What’s so special about me and my site? Nothing really. The key is what is not-so-special about the other sites competing for that phrase.

Before we move on here, I realize that for the most part all rankings on Google are free. We do not pay Google directly to rank well for our targeted keyword phrases. It would be so much easier if Google would tell us ahead of time what keyword phrases are easy to rank for. It’s too bad we couldn’t ask Google the topics where they can’t find relevant information. It’s too bad there wasn’t a list somewhere we could check.

So often when someone lists one of their sites for sale, they mention the number of backlinks it has. The number of backlinks a site has does impact its ranking in the search engines and would appear to be a important factor in valuing a website.

After a little research, I will continue to seek out backlinks for my websites but I will no longer waste a single moment on counting them.

It’s so very tempting. Drop that link, stuff a signature, or spam people’s blogs. But, when does something migrate from promotion to shameless plug and should we even worry about if it does?

First let me define how I see the terms promotion and shameless plug as variations on a theme.

To me, promotion is when you tell someone about your product, service, or website. Promotion in most cases is synonymous with advertising.

A shameless plug on the other hand is a form of promotion that somehow takes advantage of a situation to push your product, service or website.

The question is, “Is there really such a thing as a shameless plug anymore or has society just come to accept them more than they did in the past?”

Yes, content is king, but is there such a thing as too much? This question was asked in one of the forums I frequent and the answers were quite varied. I thought I would throw out for anyone who’s interested my thoughts on the subject.