I read in lots of forums and articles that a few SEO factors are outdated. (post based on this article). Let’s take a look at some of them:

Keyword Stuffing comes back often in SEO discussion. My answer to that is:  you should not have waiedt for keyword stuffing to be an irrelevant SEO factor to stop doing it. You shouldn’t have done it in the first place! Yes, content is King and yes, having some keywords in the content can help, but there is a big difference between using some keywords in the content and keyword stuffing in every possible way. (how about a nice giant tag cloud at the bottom of each page?)

Reciprocal link: This one comes back often as well. Websites like this one say: “Google has publically (?) said that it does not like reciprocal linking“. I beg to differ. Google has said that they don’t like people exchanging links just to gain some link juice and skew the rankings. That’s different. They don’t want you to mess with their precious algorithm and instead of trying to fight people doing it, they just announce that it does not count anymore and hope most people will stop doing it. In this case, common sense prevail again. I don’t see anything wrong with exchanging link when it makes sense for the user. I would actually recommend it. You will not get penalized for it. (the famous “Google Penalty”). Here is a video of Matt Cutts expressing this idea:

Paid links: In the article I mentioned above, they do say that in some cases, it could be okay to have a paid link. But most articles out there say: “No paid links could ever help you with SEO”.  How do they know that? Yahoo Search Directory is still considered a value directory and it is a paid one. Moreover, how can Google know whether you paid for that link or not?  Lastly, you can’t get penalized for incoming links because it would make Google’s algorithm way too easy to manipulate. Worse case scenario, you won’t get anything for your link (reciprocal or paid) so why not give it a try?

I am not really a big advocate of paid links. There are much better ways to get some links but every once in a while, a paid link might bring very relevant traffic. SEO needs to be turned around and companies need to do what makes sense for the user, not only the search engines. If exchanging links with a website makes sense, don’t worry about search engines and just go ahead.

In the end, it’s the people who buy your products and services, not the search engines.