Bad webmaster advice

The worst advice you have seen about SEO, design, development...

[graeme_p]

I have been meaning to share these for a while

1. An warning from a previous developer that a site might lose its ranking in the SERPS because meta keywords and description elements had been removed. I removed them because they were excessively long and identical on every single page of the site.
   
2. From a supposed SEO touting for business: "move your site to Wordpress, so you can use Wordpress SEO plugins". Never mind that the platform it was on was better suited to it that Wordpress from every other point of view, or that he could provide any particular examples of what would be fixed by the plugins, or that it would be a lot easier to tweak the existing platform to fix any SEO deficiencies than to move.
   
3. "Do not ever use tables". At least that is what I think a designer I worked with had been told. What he needed was a two column table. What he did was:
   
   

   <div id="details">

   
   
   and within that each row was:
   
   

   <p><b>Column one text:</b> Column two text</p>

   
   
   and then set "#details p b" to fixed width in the CSS
   
   id name and text changed to protect the guilty.
   

[lucy24]

Thank you for not subtitling the thread "Worst advice you have ever GIVEN..."

or that he could provide any particular examples

By the usual yawn-provoking coincidence I have just this minute come from a neighboring thread [webmasterworld.com] where someone frivolously suggested sneaking a superfluous "not" into someone else's page text.

Now, if only I could figure out why the "highlight=msg" trick only works on alternate Tuesdays...

[martinibuster]

At conferences, in blog posts, and often in tweets there are a group of SEOs associated with tools, either directly or indirectly who consistently give SEO advice mixed with tools to make it happen (tools that happen to be sold by their patron or employer). The SEO advice is given in the context of a technique, but the technique almost always involves using a tool to help make it happen. Getting SEO advice from that group is like obtaining recipes from Campbells Soup- every recipe has cream of mushrooms in it.

[graeme_p]

@lucy, the coincidence being that I omitted a "not"? it should have been "He could not provide any examples".

Bad advice you have given would be a great thread.

@martinibuster, love the analogy.

[engine]

Bad advice from a spammer: A client received this from a spammer in the usual round of spammy e-mails, "I can get you to number 1 on Google"

Client calls me and says, "i'm thinking of their offer, it's cheap!"

My light hearted response, "You're already at number 1 and it hasn't cost you a penny since last year. Thanks for the reminder, i'll send you my invoice."