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Here’s a list of the top ten most common and outdated SEO mistakes. If you are getting into SEO for the first time, or you are trying to generate more traffic for your site, be sure you are aware of these outdated techniques. It’s important for you to understand that the search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to prevent people from gaming the system and artificially raising their rank in the search engine results page.

This article at Red Hand Studios explains some of these outdated and unethical techniques. Please note that not only are these techniques ineffective, many of them will actually result in your page or site being penalized by the search engines.

Want to rank number one, but just the thought of doing any work makes you tired? How about you simply eliminate the competition from the SERP? Thanks to A-List SEO.

Have fun with this endeavor as it will surely bring you success for a few days. That is till someone reports you for doing the same thing once you are now in the #1 chair. Because once you are in the Hot Seat everyone is now making you the next target.

Google Bowling 2.0

Thanks Matt Jones! Here’s a little social media technique that will certainly be addressed now that someone has pointed it out. Bummer though, free links are cool. Especially from pages with rank.

Remember yesterday I linked to Dees post about coComment?, which is a service that allows you to track comments you have made on blogs.

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The meta keywords tag is dead. Done. Over. Useless.

Well, mostly. There are still some small benefits to using the meta keywords tag, but unless you know what they are, you may be using it improperly.

If there’s anything I particularly hate when it comes to SEO, it’s the meta keywords tag. I so wish it had never been invented. It’s practically useless, yet people still obsess over it. In this article, I’ll explain more about why you shouldn’t worry about it except perhaps for misspellings, as well as which search engines support it.

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Last week, Rand Fishkin published an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts. Matt repeated, in plain English, that it’s perfectly safe to use nofollow on your internal links, to control the flow of PageRank within your own site. I thought this would end the controversy, but Rand’s interpretation of Matt’s comments left an opening for the semantic parsers of the world to pick a fight.

So we can’t really control our page rank, but it turns out that we can (and should!) be controlling the flow of internal page rank on our sites. This article describes in simple terms what this means, and gives an easy example of how you can get started controlling your page rank and getting more pages indexed.

read more | sphinn story

Social media marketing has a direct effect on search engine rankings and engines are using social voting systems and bookmarking trends to determine quality sites.

This is a good article, with some nice information on how search engines use social media sites to influence SERPs. Especially interesting is the coverage of patents that seem to hint at how this information is used to affect ranking.

read more | digg story