The conversation I had with one of our clients yesterday made me inquisitive (and a little infuriated) as to what dealers are being taught in regards to automotive SEO.  Everyone is on a tear to learn SEO for themselves, strategize for themselves, and implement things for themselves solely based on what they are learning from people inside the Automotive industry (hey dealers, there’s a plethora of the best SEO information in the world just outside our automotive bubble).

Our client has been with us for about a month.  They wanted to talk to me about the SEO strategy they’ve implementing internally over the past 45 days or so.  Their strategy was to go out and buy 50 individual domains, turn them into “microsites” and point all links back to their main domain.  Meanwhile, we haven’t even broached the subject of improving SEO on their main domain.  There are 1,000 things wrong with this strategy including the way they were implementing it.  These microsites were literally one page deep, contained zero content, zero META information and zero value in the eyes of Google.  Let alone the fact they were all the same, so there is a huge duplicate content issue (assuming there was any content).

These guys were “TAUGHT” that building as many microsites as possible and then linking them to their main website is going to increase their rankings.  WRONG! 

I’m angry.  Not at the poor guys who had to un-learn everything they were taught at NADA, but at all the WRONG SEO information that is floating around this industry.  SEO is not an art…nor is it a science.  It’s proven “theory-in-practice”.  But there are still SEO fundamentals that anyone who practices SEO should be aware of  - especially if they are out there preaching it to innocent dealers who know no different.  

That basic, simple, “SEO 101” theory is as follows: SEO YOUR MAIN WEBSITE, and for g-d’s sake please do some research outside this industry.  I have posted this before, but here again is a link to an article posted by one of the leading SEO professionals in the world, Rand Fishkin.  The article is called, “The Microsite Mistake”.  I’ll let Rand take it from here:  http://www.ecarlist.com/blog/2010/03/the-microsite-mistake/

 Here are some great SEO resources that apply universally:

www.searchenginewatch.com

www.SEOroundtable.com

www.sempo.org 

www.SEOMOZ.com

Can you spot it?  It's the sign of misplaced priorities.  That's not a Toyota.  It's a Nissan Juke.  And as you read this, it's probably still sitting proudly on the website of a very large dealer group's franchise flagship store.  

This dealer's priority was "SEO".  It wasn't usability, aesthetics, functionality, integration, or even process.  It was S - E - O.  They decided to get a website with what they perceive is the best automotive SEO company in our space.  The problem?  The website is not good.  The SEO may or may not be good, but let's assume it's great.  It's irrelevant because  this image is one of approximately 30 mistakes that I found on this dealers website - all to do with usability.

But it's ok, because the SEO is all that matters.  Right?  I feel badly because dealers have been hammered over the head with the SEO Hammer for so long, they are almost brainwashed walking around in some SERP-induced comma.  

Dealers, please...get your priorities in order.  SEO is allowed to be one of them, but putting SEO above website usability (and in this case accuracy) is putting the cart directly in the way of the horse.  

We have all heard that Google is upping its game when it comes to screening out "spammy" SEO tactics. This includes content farms and link abuse.  Link abuse has been a cat and mouse game since Google incorporated external links as part of their ranking algorithm.  In the "old days", it was all about links, links, and more links.  The more links you had regardless of reciprocal (link trading), one way, three way, etc. the higher your rankings were.  It was simple.

Google got wiser and started devaluing links that were reciprocal and/or irrelevant.  They also got keener on other SEO spam tactics and started taking action. In 2005, BMW was booted off of Google's index and had their Page Rank dropped to 0 because of spammy doorway pages.  

Last month, JC Penny was caught with their pants down by Google for hiring a 3rd party "link farm" which was renting hundreds or thousands of links to boost JC Penny's rankings.  And just today, news broke that Overstock.com was encouraging college students to link to their website in exchange for a discount on their site.  Both practices are considered 'black hat", unnatural and unethical in Google's eyes.  The penalties range from a drop in existing rankings, to a boot from the index and a loss of Page Rank (as with BMW). 

The days of renting links, buying links and trading links are over.  It's just too risky to bet your URL's entire history and momentum.  Your site will gather links in time organically.  You can boost your Automotive SEO momentum by submitting to directories and including links in blogs and articles with anchor text in the link such as above.  Dealers should be focused on building high quality, keyword-rich content for their websites instead of spending money on renting or buying links from 3rd parties.  With proper automotive social marketing ,reputation management, and branding your links will come.

Content is still King when it comes to SEO, and from our perspective (and Google's) it will / should remain that way.