The SEO techniques that should be avoided
Digital marketing is always evolving. I remember a time when Reels weren’t a thing, and Facebook wasn’t filled with ads.
But if one marketing channel has changed dramatically, it’s SEO.
SEO was around even before the term ‘social media’ popped up. Many believe that search engine optimisation started in 1998 when Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Watch, started popularising the term and helping clients optimise their content to rank well in search engine results.
With 24 years of SEO comes 24 years of evolution, and sure enough, the strategy and tactics that once worked don’t work anymore.
In fact, they are so outdated that using them could actually get your website penalised and removed from Google.
This is because Google regularly updates its algorithm to ensure it always delivers the best results to the people who use it.
Google used to only make a few updates a year, but now it’s making thousands which means it’s important for SEO providers and business owners to do their own SEO to ensure they are staying up to date with the latest changes.
Old SEO techniques that should be avoided
Before major core algorithm updates like Panda and Penguin, Google was like the wild wild west. Rankings were easily manipulated, and unethical SEO practices were rife. It’s during these times that many of these SEO techniques were invented.
You won’t believe some of the tactics old SEOs used!
Keyword stuffing
Keywords are the foundation of SEO, and every good strategy should start with keyword research. Once you have your chosen keywords, they should appear on your page naturally.
Keyword stuffing is where you add your chosen keywords excessively to a page to try and appear like you have the most relevant content. But, this makes your content unreadable and can lead users to exit the page, not to mention Google focuses on semantic search, so it tries to match user intent through the context of a page rather than the exact keywords.
If you focus on creating great content about a certain topic, you will naturally include your target keywords.
Hidden text
Adding text to a page in the same colour as the background is very sneaky and, let’s be honest, a very high-school-essay-trying-to-hit-the-word-count tactic. They would use this to add more keywords to web pages (like keyword stuffing) without sacrificing the content's readability. Of course, if they had just written great content in the first place, they wouldn’t need to hide text.
Cloaking
The old SEO technique of cloaking is as shady as it sounds. A website owner will create one page to show search engines (usually highly “optimised” but without focusing on customer experience) and the other for customers. This used to be a great way to get around web spam filters, but Google has actually banned it outright.
Link farms
An example of a link farm
Approximately 10 years ago, Google introduced the Penguin algorithm and took a stronger stance on manipulative link-building practices. One of these is link farming.
PageRank was an algorithm update Google released that thought of links as votes, where a page linking to another page is casting a vote. The old adage was that the more backlinks you had (a website linking to yours), the more popular you were and the more popular you were, the more trustworthy and relevant you were. Many SEOs used manipulative link-building practices to increase their authority and, thus, their rankings in Google.
Link farms are websites created for the sole purpose of creating backlinks and increasing the authority of certain websites. Most of the content on these websites is hyperlinked and unreadable.
It goes without saying that this should be avoided at all costs.
When you think about SEO and how inextricably linked it is to customer experience, you can see why these wouldn’t be good for your website and why you would be penalised.
New SEO techniques that should be avoided
While SEO has come a long way, there are still a bunch of techniques SEO providers use, and business owners are taught that can harm websites and businesses. Usually, it comes down to a misunderstanding of a common SEO tactic that is used the wrong way.
Here are the most common.
Creating individual landing pages for related keywords
While it’s important to match the search intent of a page to a target keyword, you shouldn’t be creating a single landing page for every single keyword. Google’s algorithm understands keyword synonyms, and you could risk keyword cannibalisation if your pages are too similar. Not to mention, how different can your content be if you’re targeting similar keyword variations?
Rather than creating separate landing pages, the better SEO tactic would be to create a single, super-informative page that includes all of these keyword synonyms.
Quantity over quality
While SEO providers stress the importance of regular content, it shouldn’t be done at the expense of good content. Weekly 500-word blog articles that only scratch the surface of topics are not going to get you the results you want. Think about it, if you’re pushing for one piece of content a week, it’s going to be expensive, time-consuming and will exhaust your audience if you’re constantly sharing it.
Taking your time with more heavily researched content will end up benefiting you in the long run.
Over-reliance on AI
AI has come a long way, but we’re not at the stage where you can trust AI to write a good blog article without being heavily edited by you.
Blogs should not be boring and dry. Even if your blog is really informative, adding your brand personality to it means your audience will connect with it more and will be more likely to come back and read your other content.
Becoming obsessed with Domain Authority
Backlinks are an important part of SEO, but I don’t believe the old way of doing backlinks is relevant anymore. A lot of SEOs will focus on obtaining backlinks from websites with high domain authority to try and get some of their “juice” passed on, but it’s way more beneficial to get backlinks from sites with high website traffic and even more beneficial to get backlinks from sites where your target audience hangs out.
After all, conversions are the ultimate goal, and domain authority is just a vanity metric unless it actually leads to more conversions.
Unfortunately, many SEO agencies still use and teach business owners these bad SEO techniques.
If you’re looking for an ethical SEO agency that focuses on a holistic approach to SEO – one that takes into account your business goals, brand and target audience – you’ll want to work with us! Get in touch to arrange a casual 30-minute chat.
