Whiteboard Friday - All the mistakes that we have made

Rand Returns...
“All the mistakes we have made”
Biggest mistakes that seomoz has made in their advice and in their own practice. Here are the relevant takings from todays WhiteBoard Friday!

1) Reciprocal links
Rand, back in the day, used to dabble in greyer areas of SEO. His first mistake mentions the tactic of offering reciprocal links but blocking the outbound links via the robots.txt file using nofollow. This tactic did not really work and he ended up having to do a lot of word to get in the good graces of webmasters once again.

2) Buying links for clients.
Back in 2005 Rand was buying links for clients. Matt Cuts came out at that time to say Google were moving against paid links.
Matt called Rand and said: “Dude, I can see you are doing these paid links, I want to let you know that they are not being counted and actually they may hurt you.”
Since those days , google has grown exponentially against the buying of links and now it is considered a very bad practice. More importantly we can no longer guarantee that these links are providing value. Instead of spending the money on links, invest it in becoming more creative with your clients account.

3) H1 tags with keywords.
The realisation, after testing thoroughly through the use of formal machine learning correlation tests, that having a H1 on a page is no more valuable than having the keyword at the top of the text in large or bold font. Shock horror, the hours spent convincing a client to implement this...

4) Don’t use XML sitemaps??
Rand is mortified that he used to advise people not to use XML sitemaps. Rand’s reasoning behind this (having an XML sitemap can make it difficult to spot information architecture problems) was sound but proved to be not as important as the advantage of using them. XML sitemaps do such a great job of getting content indexed. He knows so many people who have used them and seen great results and jump in traffic particularly for long tail, now he strongly recommends them.

5) Redirect Linkscape to open site explorer.
On realisation that OSE is a lot better interface than Linkscape, SEOmoz decided to 301 redirect all the old reports to OSE. Unfortunately this resulted in a loss of significant traffic to the site due to the fact that Rel=canonical was never implemented. Unfortunately a lot of the damage was already done.

Happy Friday Everyone!