hermosa - 6:16 am on May 8, 2004 (gmt 0)

As suggested by one of the moderators. I think that this is an EXCELLENT topic. There has been way too much learning by trial and error of late. That's much too expensive a way to learn. I run two bonafide business sites that have a lot of content (articles etc., plus pages that describe our services). Both sites rated in the top 10 for years for 6 keywords that are critical to our business. That situataion seemed to change drastically after Hilltop. I compared my page to the pages in top positions and concluded (incorrectly) that I needed to repeat the keywords more often in the meta tags and H tags.

The results...a disaster....my home pages and the 3 pages related to the specific subject dropped out of the top 100 for "red widgets". If I do a search for "red widgits mycity", in some cases those pages appear in the top 2. The Google page ranks are 6/10 for the index.html and home.html pages on one site and 5/10 for those pages on another site.

Two questions, now that I have stopped the keyword stuffing and worked hard to build even more reciprocal links anchored with the text "red widgits", will I ever see those pages return to top 10 status? Roughly how long do you think it will take? (When I run the pages "red widgets" keyword through Scroogle, I am in the top 5.

So that I don't make the same COSTLY mistakes again:

- What are the top 5 SEO techniques to avoid AT ALL COSTS, for Google?

Thank you.