General Negatives for a Site

Things you should never do when optimizing a site.

[mdewber1]

Does anyone have advice that an SEO should NOT do when optimizing a site. Maybe some simple things that look good and seem good but actually hurt your site. Any Ideas? Thanks!

Marc

[PatrickDeese]

the three things I can think of right off the bat are:

1) important text content in presented with graphics.

2) flash only site.

3) a site that uses a JS sniffer, and redirects to a splash page when JS is not supported.

Any of those will pretty much guarantee poor results in the search engines, but the list is pretty much endless.

[Eltiti]

Some "optimizations" I would avoid:

* Cloaking (some people would add: "unless you *really* know what you're doing");
* Changing the structure of your site dramatically without creating the appropriate redirects (301);
* Link hoarding to "preserve PR";
* Excessive cross-linking between your own sites.

[mdewber1]

Eltiti:

What would you consider excessive cross linking. I own three other sites. I link them once on each page and no more. What do you think?

[Eltiti]

See your sticky!

[larryhatch]

I would add anything that could cause a penalty.
This may include keyword stuffing, bogus 302 redirects, link farms and similar ..

Then I would add anything that puts off the visitor:
Anything flashing and scrolling; popups / pop-unders, "free" hosts that smear cr** all over the page ..
Anything that looks amateurish: garish colors, mis-spelled words (sp?) . .
Large hit counters that look like 'Visitor # 000019 '

Validate pages to find dumb small things which could prevent proper indexing.