Getting carried away by aggressive Search Engine Optimization
Purposefully doing SEO can create the temptation to take some actions that can compromise your objective and even get your site banned at the extreme. Good SEO means getting good content, and building a site that is useful to users, and that is built using light, valid and a high content to markup ratio. The only active SEO you should do is to avoid doing the known 'bad things'. If your site is good for the users, the few visitors you get will market the site for you and even get inbound inks for you... which is your objective anyway.
Below are references to situations where the people who has heavily capitalised on a particular characteristic or variable in the google or other major search engine formula have been thrown-off as a result of the search-engine in question changing it's forular, or even discovering and punishing the tactic in questions.
The SEO tricks and golden ideas I am referring to can range from ideas such as keyword stuffing that are now clearly not done, to seemingly smart and lucrative, but with the promise of short-cutting proper procedure is the potential risk of punitive repercussions. Here are some stories and rants from folks that have been side-stepped by google, and are justifiably or not telling it like it is:
Comments
Frustration of an SEO - comment to: aralbalkan.com/1066
In order for google to remain relevant, it must maintain independence from the so-called heavyweights and use it's whim and strategic thinking of make sure search results are of good quality. Otherwise it will be falling into the trap of the old paradigm that we all dislike (the elite sites or minds determining what is worth public notice). I am sorry that you got punished for having money-making, but content irrelevant links on your site, but many of use that write content for the love of our trades (not to spread pagerank to others) did not get punished.
My golden rule is that SEO on purpose and just for the sake or SEO, or to master and exploit the google formula is the undoing of any SEO effort. As we all know, if you write useful content that makes sense to humans, and only link to things that will benefit your readers (not links to benefit your friends), your site will establish itself as useful to human beings (who are the ultimate consumers of your site anyway), regardless of what google, Lycos, Yahoo, or whatever the next search engine dictatorship might be.
Just to let you know, I lost my entire pagerank between August and November (I removed the www in my domain), but this did not affect the traffic... the results ranking actually continued to improve. I stay aware of the rules, but never bend to them just for ranking at the expense of good information.