Customer Street SEO Articles & Help

So 2007 is over, SEO in 2007 changed dramatically. Best practices shifted on a monthly basis, and time-honored methods became obsolete and dangerous – literally overnight. Here are a few of the big changes that made webmasters think in terms of online website organic marketing.

Reciprocal links. In May of 2007, Realtors who relied heavily on reciprocal links started to sob as -30 penalties were dished out by Google, harming their business. It became clear that the decade-old tradition of reciprocal links programs was over. Done. Finished. Time to get one way links.

The “site: *** -sljktf” command (to show the supplemental index results). Google’s supplemental index used to be handy for finding out which pages on your own site were doing poorly and needed some extra tender loving care, and spammers had their own uses for it. For a while in 2007, the supplemental index still existed with no obvious markings. Now it got merged into one main, regular index.

Directory links. Buying directory links is another decade-old SEO tradition that Google took a pretty big swipe at when it devalued the PageRank of hundreds of lower-quality, made-for-webmasters directories this year. Customerstreet is far from a low quality directory company. We have seen improvements in the results our clients are getting and also our own success. Since September when I started at Customerstreet, traffic has increased on Smilelocal.com by 185% and moreuk.com is up 34% while ufindus.com has improved by 33%, this may seem low in comparison to the others but if you take into account that ufindus business directory gets 8 times the traffic that Smilelocal gets its a fantastic increase.(stats as of 3rd Jan 2008).

Open link brokers and link networks. Not so long ago, it was possible to pick up the phone and call a major text link broker with open inventory and buy your way to good rankings. Now sites that openly sell links are coming under heavy fire. Top-secret brokers and hand-picked, carefully negotiated and camouflaged buys are the paid way in 2008.

Sponsored blog post networks. Pay-per-post bloggers also got whacked. Bloggers who accept payments are going to have to do their best to look legitimate and be undetectable.

Owning the SERPs with subdomains. This common reputation management and branding technique was recently declared obsolete when Google announced that there would be no more than 2 results from any one domain served up in the search results. However, real life searches show that some companies are still getting away with it.

10 Blue Links. It used to be the gospel that there were 10 identical search results for any given query and there was some kind of way to rank. Now that universal search includes video, audio, news, blogs and local listings and mammoth sites like Wikipedia and Knol are sure to rank for a few of the slots on popular searches, MFA and thin-affiliates are in trouble, and Webmasters can’t take a ranking for granted. Even more remarkable, more linkworthy, more multi-media content is in order for 2008. Quality over quantity.

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