What has been your worst SEO experience?
Notice: This is a discussion thread for comments about the SitePoint article, Laying the Foundations of SEO Success.
Worst point is having to explain to clients, that get cold called by liars and crooks endemic in the seo ‘industry’ and then get convinced by a lot of BS promises, why what they’ve been told is BS.
Spending about 3 weeks building something, and seeing no results, then taking it down and moving to another site, and seeing it listed on the first site and getting traffic (to a now dead site), then taking down the new site area and putting it back up on the old, and the visitors just vanished LOL
My mistake was impatience LOL
What, no mention of the most important aspect - copywriting!!!
submitted invalid sitemap to google webmaster tools 
My worst SEO experiences have been dealing with the snake-oil salesmen and general rubbish posted on this forum!
Spam city! Building traffic only to have 99% be worthless junk. It’s a hard life.
This is a very good article and covers most of the SEO basics. However, I think that there are many off-site technqiues that you should mention like for example social bookmarking and RSS distribution. The last one is valid if your website generates RSS feeds off course.
This SEO looks like it is going to be hard work, I have just launched www.cararena.co.uk and my main task at the moment is to find out how to move it up the natural listings on the Search Engines…think it is going to be a lot of hard work…any suggestion? We’re currently on page three for most of our keywords (was page 15 three weeks ago).
Many Thanks
Ashley
There is no such thing as fast oraganic SEO. You will have to spend at least 1 month working really hard to see some results. Still when you get higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), you will increase the traffic to your website and increase your income from it 
Thanks for the advice, we are spending about £1000 a day on keywords advertising with google. So the more time and effort we put into SEO could save us quite a lot of money. We just need to get on to page one, we’re halfway up page three at the moment.
This is exactly what I meant SEO saves money. Since you are on page 3, you have to put a lot of effort and I strongly recommend spending some time to read more about the best off-site SEO practices such as Article Marketing, Social Networking and all kinds of goodies. Remember that if you mess up your SEO, you might loose all your rankings and even get excluded from Google’s index, so be careful…
My worst experience has generally been doing clean up work where a bunch of junky links were purchased, and the customer’s site was penalized.
Hah, I had the same problem. For 2 months 4 websites were dropping for some of their most important keywords without a good reason. The main thing that was done was article marketing, so once we look at the articles we found that they were written in some language, which resembles English. So it tooks us 2 months to replace everything and now it appears that Google had remove this penalty Still, everyone, who is just starting to do SEO must be really carefull, because Google is watching everything
The trouble is SEO practices change every-so-often, more so that anything on the web. So I cannot really trust anything but being natural, as they will help you in the long run. Link Building is some that you must really do carefully. I did it on a client’s site, and it was not the best of experiences. Waste of time, with obviously no affect.
This is great advice! Only thing I’ll add is don’t limit yourself to articles. Make videos and share on youtube (You could even rank high through Google video searches on the main page), share pictures. Pretty much make any and all content you can, but make sure it’s useful, interesting, and unique.
How much time did you spent? It usually takes around 2 months to see any results at all. Furthermore, your client must already on-site SEO.
I tried doing seo my worst experience is spinning articles.
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Despite the fact that there are a lot of article spinners today all over the internet, I have to say that those tools not only do not make your articles 100% unique, but usually make them unreadable. I think that using article spinners for marketing is considered Grey Hat technique (somewhere between White and Black Hat SEO) and should not be used at all It will be a lot better to hire some article writers to do the work for you
Yes I guess that’s true spinning article is just wasting your time, if you can hire a writer much better to have a fresh article to post. actually after that incident I never use article spinner again. lol =)
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