Recently we received a question about URL structure that was really wrapped around a larger question. The real issue was one of, “if everyone is doing it there must be an SEO benefit”. Here is our response about “everyone is doing it” as it relates to SEO:

1. I remember when we could repeat keywords over and over on a webpage and rank for that phrase on AltaVista. It was easy. You would just make the keyword density as high as you could and you would do very well…. Everyone did it. One day it suddenly ended… along with AltaVista.
2. Prior to 2002 it was very popular to put long lists of keywords into the keyword and description tags. Everyone that wanted to rank started doing it and life was good. You want to rank? Just jam your meta tags full of keywords and you were halfway there. One day, Google turned a dial on their algorithm that eliminated the meta tags from influencing the search ranking and overnight tens of thousands of sites died – well, at least they lost their search engine traffic.
3. If you wanted to rank in competitive industries it used to be popular to stuff keywords in various parts of your site. Maybe the most popular technique was hiding keywords by making them the same color as the background. This technique was suddenly turned into a penalty of sorts in early 2004 and many thousands of website dropped out of the search engines overnight. (Strangely enough, these kinds of techniques can still work under certain circumstances).
4. It was discovered that using parts of the querystring to contain targeted keywords would give your website a boost. Everyone began doing it – especially in ecommerce. If I remember correct, Google killed this off around 2002. Again, without warning.
5. It used to be that gaining any kind of in bound link (backlinks) would boost your website in the search engines. It didn’t matter the context of the website – only that you gain links. So, everyone began doing it. You could rank very well in competitive industries by just purchasing links – or even running programs such as log file spammers, guest book spammers or any many of the different programs designed to gain backlinks. Even if you weren’t doing it you were still benefitting from any unrelated natural links because that was how Google worked. Then, along came the Google Florida update (November 2003) that killed tens of thousands of websites.
6. Hyphenated file names worked very well prior to 2005. Just separate all keywords by a hyphen and use that as the filename. Everyone started doing it. One day Google suddenly turned a dial and depressed almost all pages that contained over four hyphens. They eventually backed off from that a bit, but you can still get in trouble if you go overboard.
7. Having keywords in a domain name that were separated by hyphens became a wildly popular technique to rank well in 2004. Again, everyone started doing this. Companies would even stop doing SEO on their main website and switched to a new, more descriptive, domain that contained keywords separated by hyphens and build this site up. This ended around 2007 when the search engines suddenly changed things.
8. Sub-domains were a technique that was very popular with large respectful companies. It worked well. Then everyone, including webmasters that create thin sites, started creating sub-domains because Google assigned the same trust and strength to a sub-domain as they did to the primary domain. It worked very well and everyone prospered. One day in 2007 Google turned a dial and the sub-domains basically became worthless unless they had strong inbound links – which almost nobody had including the large respectful companies.
9. Keyword matching domains became popular for ranking well around 2007 (cellphones.com as an example). They always worked and had been used for years, but they were expensive to buy so most companies went the cheaper and *safe* route of hyphenated keywords until that technique was made irrelevant (along with the websites). Keyword matching domains became even more expensive because of the immediate SEO boost in all the search engines and the decline of hyphenated domains. You could go from position 700 to position #2 or #1 within a week by just switching to a keyword matching domain and redirecting your old site to it. It was great! Everyone started doing it. In 2010 Google was the first to dramatically remove the boost for keyword matching domains. Everyone else followed and (again) thousands of sites dropped in ranking overnight. There is still a boost to a keyword matching domain name, but it’s not as powerful as it once was.
10. Content is king. Everyone says so… and everyone agreed. Everyone was listening to Matt Cutts and other Google zombies talk about how quality content is the most important thing you can do to rank your website. So text based content became king. Everyone did it. More content, unique content, rewritten content – it didn’t matter because it worked. Everyone was especially happy because content generation was EASY and CHEAP. Then in February 2011 Google decided that content itself was not kind and killed millions of site rankings with their Panda update. People still debate the kinds of content that were removed because they don’t know what to look for… Nevertheless everyone was doing it and Google changed things up.

The above is only a small sample. In fact there are many more examples of things everyone did that the search engines eventually discounted.

Just because everyone is doing something does not mean it is safe or even something that will work. At the end of the day you need to test your own techniques and NOT on your client or production website.

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