Confessions of SEO Overkill

40 Media bravely speaks out about their SEO *#$%-ups and how to avoid the pitfall.

In order to squeeze out some more inbound linkage from web design sites, we put together a little piece on our predictions for web design in 2005, figuring we’d get some design blogs to latch onto it. We even sent out a press release to try to secure some traditional news coverage.

It caught on a bit quicker than we thought. Within days, we were receiving traffic from almost every major design site, not to mention hundreds (possibly thousands) of discussion boards and forums. Whether they agreed with our forecast or not, everyone was talking about it, and it secured some great public exposure for Forty Media.

There’s a catch, though. We were a new site with a new domain name, and within weeks we had thousands of incoming links from keyword-rich sites. We initially thought that it would be great for our search engine rankings, but there was one critical point we had failed to consider:

Sudden movements make Google nervous.

The point made: Overkill doesn't pay. Be patient. Maintain good content.