What in SEO can be considered normal and working, and what is obsolete

Part 1
What exactly does not help to occupy the Iron Throne

1. The magic of dead search engine optimization methods

At the dawn of SEO, people blindly believed that keywords were power. And the more of them, the better. Many optimized texts sinned with such a density of keywords that this made them literally unreadable, but very attractive for search engine robots. Today Yandex and especially Google recommend using only a few keywords per page, thus making texts readable primarily for people, otherwise sanctions.

Another example is links to the home page. Previously, they sought to get as many links as possible on the main page, which helped the overall position of the site, as well as increased TIC and PR. Now this tactic is more dangerous than attractive. For example, Wikipedia appears on the first page for almost any request. At the same time, an incredible amount of external links leads to the internal pages of the resource.

2. Unconventional methods

They are good as experiments, but they will not replace the classical basis. Non-traditional methods of promotion include, for example, campaigns on social networks. They say that social signals are gaining more and more power in search engine algorithms. All this is true, but so far there is no clear evidence for this. Matt Cutts himself recently stated that Google+ has no direct influence on the ranking. Many bloggers and SEO professionals, however, continue to find evidence to the contrary. So, on the website Webmasters.ru the author gives a number of examples where, in his opinion, it is precisely social factors that influence the ranking results.

3. Aggressive working methods

For example, obsession with links. Links are still one of the main ranking factors. However, firstly, the link is different, and thanks to one link you will rise in SERP, and the other will instantly disappear from the Search Engines Index. Secondly, if you receive links aggressively, each month and for 100-200 pieces at a time, then this situation threatens you with the so-called link explosion, when search engines begin to doubt the naturalness of the links received and, as a result, impose sanctions.

American SEO Specialist Marcus Taylor Decides to Experimentto prove that a link explosion could cause a penalty on Google’s side, as well as look at the nature of the sanctions. For this purpose, he took one domain, published the content, and in 24 hours received 10,000 links to it. Of course, 99% of them were of very poor quality. As a result, the site came first in SERP for a promoted keyword (fairly competitive) and lasted there for three weeks. However, then he not only lost his position, but flew far beyond visibility even by brand requests, and this, as you know, was a very bad sign.

4. Excessive honesty, correctness and nobility

SEO books teach only white methods. A step to the left, a step to the right - and you flew out like a traffic jam from SERP. However, in the real world, partly you have to cunning, keep your nose in the wind and be in the general trend. In the market of goods and services, not only the strongest survive, but also the most cunning, the one who knows where, how and what to crank to achieve a result without receiving sanctions from search engines.
So, Kommersant has published a list of the most popular online stores . But did you know that 70% of them buy bundles of links from link brokers? But this not only does not bother them, but also, apparently, helps to be the most successful projects in their field.

5. Dramatic changes in strategy

Let's say you have dramatically changed the strategy for using the resource. One of the sites describes the history of a blog, which, due to a sharp change in strategy of the 200 initially indexed pages, eventually left only 9. The new owner bought a promising blog with decent 200 articles, good PR and TIC indicators. However, he decided to achieve quick success and instead of publishing high-quality posts, he began to publish small texts with links, which often represented a set of words. In addition, these texts were in no way related to the site. As a result, the blog almost completely crashed from the Yandex Index, and then Google.

6. Inability to hold high positions

The situation when the site has achieved excellent positions in SERP, and then flew far beyond the limits of visibility, is quite common. And the point here is not necessarily the use of black tactics, but the fact that, acting in a "white" way, you optimized the site, brought it to the top positions in SERP, were delighted ... and gave up. In SEO, it’s important not only the promotion itself, but also the support of the achieved positions. And at the same time you need regular updating of content, fresh links, adding new pages. You must give at least some signs of life to search engines so that they do not exclude you from the game.

On the Nomina websiteYou can find a huge number of abandoned domains: link donors, moneymaking blogs and other resources. If you also pay attention to the indicators for TCI, PR, site traffic, you can understand their fate: whether they were created simply as donors, whether optimization was performed, or whether they were supported.

7. If you think you have nothing to lose, the most unsightly things can happen.

Sometimes site owners act on the principle of “what do we lose”, creating a resource and applying everything indiscriminately to achieve quick and tangible success. Basically, these are companies that do not really value their reputation and which, if it does not work out with one site, immediately launch the next.

So, some time ago, the British company Citadel Insurance launched its website. Long before the first paragraph of the text was published on the site, the resource began to actively buy links. As a result, literally 3 days after registration, the site appeared on the first page, overtaking even ten-year resources with published content. The site purchased about 130,000 links, and used only 7 variations of anchor. As expected, after a while the site fell several pages, and then completely disappeared from sight. However, its owners, without thinking twice, launched another resource. And they began to promote it on the same principle.

Part 2.
What can help

1. Happy occasion

Believe it or not, some are just lucky. Here you can search for patterns, compare with other sites, analyze the action plan, and in the end it turns out that in no way do they shine against the background of competitive resources, but they live, enjoy and occupy excellent positions in SERP. The only regularity that can be deduced with relative accuracy here is that "fat" sites that have useful topics and generally useful, social missions can lead with a higher probability than their antipodes.

An example is the American site Doctor360helping people improve their credit score. When the resource was just launched, its developers were not very concerned about competent SEO. They just got 13 external links with anchors “Doctor 360”, “Read here”, “Here”, “My site”, “Click here”, “Doctor360.com” - and that’s all. As a result, 54 days after the launch, the resource was in the top 4 for some of the keywords. This success is nothing but “lucky”, it is impossible to explain.

2. Secret weapons

SEO is considered one of the most opaque industries on the Internet. Almost every successful site has its own secret weapon: a tool, a scheme, or an algorithm — however, few will reveal their maps to you. Even if the company writes on its blog about a very successful case, which provided excellent positions in SERP, or about some miracle method, do not believe it. Most likely, real weapons will remain secret.

Richard Marriott increased traffic to his site by 348% in just 7 days. What was his secret weapon? He prepared excellent material on the best tools for building links and began to actively promote it in search engines, social networks, and then with the help of email newsletters. As a result, in addition to organic traffic, it received about 3,500 visitors from blogs, Facebook and other resources.

3. Promotion in multiple search engines

From 60% to 70% of people use Yandex, the remaining percent goes to Google, and only a small “piece” of the audience falls on Rambler. All this is so. However, you should not concentrate on only one search engine.

There are two reasons for this:

• if Yandex (Google or Rambler) changes the algorithm and you disappear from the first pages, you will have a “back up plan” in the form of other search engines, where you will still hold positions firmly enough;
• your path to the first pages in other search engines can be much shorter, because there may be less competition and the search engines themselves are more friendly towards your site initially.

OnlineGuru , offering a variety of online games, wrote on the Google forum. The site complained that previously traffic with Google was approximately 40%, and now it is no more than 10%. At the same time, SEO-specialists cleaned all the links, fixed the errors indicated on Google Webmaster Tools, uploaded decent content to the site. While at the request of "online games" OnlineGuru does not appear on Google even on the first 5 pages, in Yandex, on this request, the site falls in second position on the first page.

4. Own brains

You do not deduct any super secret on the forums. Those who got to the bottom of the truth are unlikely to share it with you. The only way is to experiment yourself. Depending on what exactly is the essence of the experiments, conduct them at intervals of 3-6 months and look at the results. It is not recommended to conduct tests more often, since you cannot accurately determine which of your experiments affected positions in SERP, traffic, PR-site, TIC, traffic, etc.

You can find many examples of tireless experimenters in American popular blogs , for example in MOZ. So, its authors conducted experiments to find out how much tweets affect the ranking results and what role the site speed has in Google’s algorithm
.

5. Noble methods of work, up to charity

White optimization methods will allow not only to achieve top positions in SERP, but also to stay on them. Do not pollute the portfolio of your links with links from sites of dubious reputation, do not buy them in hundreds, do not litter the site with advertising, regularly publish high-quality content that they will read and share with friends - and then you are guaranteed success. Remember, it’s much easier initially to play honestly and even slowly but surely move towards your goal than to correct mistakes and clean your tainted reputation in search engines.

America is literally booming for TOMS shoes. And not only because it is very light and comfortable, but also because when buying a pair of TOMS shoes, one pair is sent to poor children in Africa. A few years ago, TOMS hired an SEO company to help them increase website traffic. One of the company's tricky tactics was badging. The company tried to establish relations with various shows, influential bloggers in the field of fashion, as well as many sites to place there not just a link, but a badge with the inscription “I love my TOMS”. This helped not only in terms of SEO, but also increased brand awareness. Since the company donates shoes to the needy, many sites agreed to place the badge completely free. As a result, thanks to the bagging and generally well-planned campaign for building links, as well as positive reviews, traffic to the site increased by 1,100%.

6. The most advanced tools

Undoubtedly, you always need to find and put into practice new tools for website promotion. They appear quite often: all kinds of plugins, modules, metrics and more. But something rarely appears that is fundamentally “different”, giving really great opportunities. Of the latest innovations, SeoPult is an automated article promotion module that draws on the power of WebArtex. The main problem that this module or the WebArtex exchange itself can solve is a way out of the deadlock, which optimizers advance in articles and constantly encounter low-quality, spammed, non-working donors. This is truly a non-trivial task - to find for yourself a good, reliable pool of donors and organize simple, convenient work with them. Hence the second value of the new exchange - the work in it is fully automated: both launching the project in two clicks, and convenient selection of donors by filters, and writing unique texts, and reports on the positions of promoted requests. Article promotion of this format is great for young sites.

Here is an inspirational example.after a young Internet site reached traffic of 40,000 people a day in 3-4 months using the article promotion method. The whole secret lies in regular work and in the fact that high-quality articles on high-quality donors are the right formula for naturally building up link mass.

7. Promotion budgets

It’s only in textbooks that the difference between SEO and advertising is that in the case of Google AdWords and contextual advertising on Yandex, you pay to get to the first pages, and in the case of SEO, you get there for free. In practice, website promotion without a budget is very sad. The larger your budget, the higher the chances of success.

Judge for yourself:

• to create great content, you need a good copywriter, and perhaps also a designer, and their work costs money;
• a post or a link on a famous blog is unlikely to get you for free;
• expenses may also include paid SEO analytics tools, link buying, etc.

In theory, it is possible that financial opportunities do not affect your positions in SERP, but in practice - do not hesitate, they will help you very well.
You know blogs like Theme , Sergey Share or Exler. Everything that their authors undertake, if it does not turn into gold, then at least one sure step brings them closer to success. The price of posting material on one of these blogs varies from 50,000 to 300,000 rubles. For quality links on sites with high PR and TIC, be prepared to pay from a couple of hundred to several thousand rubles apiece. Of course, you can try to do without such expenses. But do you think your competitors with the appropriate budget will do the same?