SEO and SEM are great tools to get your website exposure, but you want to make sure you are using these tools properly. Siekaly & Stewart, a law firm in Michigan, sued their SEO company, Rainmaker Institute, for violating Google’s guidelines. According to the lawsuit: Expert analysis performed since the conclusion of the contract has shown that essentially no links were created for protectyourstudent.com and seikalystewart.com. Approximately 6720 links appear to have been created for Oaklandbusinesslawyers.com, but all the links with the exception of approximately 188 links, were worthless links built with link farming techniques and, in many cases, were not forwarding to the Plaintiff’s webpages at all.
While this link farming technique boosted the client’s website temporarily, once Google performed an update to their algorithm it negatively effected the Seikaly and Stewart’s website and not only did the client’s placement plummet, they were unknowingly the cause of spam to many clients and potential clients.
As an SEO/SEM provider you can now be legally held accountable for the practices that you are implementing. For that reason, here’s a few SEO do’s and don’ts.
- DON’T: Use Hidden Text and Links: Text that is only visible to the engines is considered spam and could result in decreased Google Placement.
- DO: Update your content based off Analytic data and Google Trends
- DON’T: List the Same Keywords Over and Over Again. This is a form of “Keyword Stuffing” and may cause Google to penalize your site.
- DO: Use Static URLs. Each page of your site should have its own readable URL that is related to that page.
- DO: Use redirects to manipulate Google Ranks. While Google does accept some redirects, using redirects to manipulate Google could result it your site becoming blacklisted.
- DO: Properly link your site to reputable sites. Proper back linking can result to increased relevance and great additional exposure.
Using proper methods when performing SEO and SEM protects you/your client’s site from dramatically losing placement at the change of any algorithm or worse; being blacklisted from Google. You always want to utilize responsible SEO/SEM Methods for your protection and to ensure your site is always viewed as a trusted site by search engines.
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