Search engine ranking algorithms change and evolve constantly. As such, website owners and administrators must know how to adapt content accordingly and adjust strategies so as to cope up with the fast-paced nature of these evolutionary changes.
Falling behind SEO can be detrimental to your website’s ability to attract traffic and stay on top of the competition. More than this, outdated tactics you may have been used to employing are not just irrelevant in the current SEO landscape—they could end up hurting your standing because of the many changes that search engines implement when it comes to ranking sites. These obsolete SEO practices may actually cause your website to be penalized under the new rules and standards that search engines implement. To avoid wasting your time and resources on ineffective tactics, keep away from these obsolete SEO tactics and practices:
1.Bulk Link buying
There used to be a time when link farms thrived and link-buying proved an effective and convenient way to earn backlinks that point to a website. Nowadays, however, quality over quantity is the name of the game as search engines look into the quality and relevance of links over the number of sites that do form links with your own. While link building remains a crucial part of optimization, websites nowadays must earn links to gain authority and visibility instead of simply subscribing to link farms or paying third parties to build them automatically.
2.Keyword abuse
Keyword abuse comes in many forms. It could mean irrelevant usage such as irrelevant keyword targeting that confuses the real message of the site and misaligns content. It could also mean bumping up keyword density (ratio of keyword usage to the page copy). Keyword abuse can likewise come in the form of keyword stuffing, which means loading webpages and content with keywords in an attempt to manipulate search results. Gaming the system with these old tricks simply won’t work and could in fact pull your rankings down.
3.Outdated keyword research strategies
Keyword-level data used to be right at marketers’ fingertips and many tend to use Google’s Keyword Planner as a sole basis for keyword research, when the data it presents mostly refer to paid traffic and competition, which means they are not the best basis for building an organic search optimization strategy around.
4.Writing primarily for robots
Keyword abuse is usually aimed at tricking search bots into viewing websites as more relevant with the help of keyword repetition. Today, however, search engines value and favor natural writing over unnatural keyword use and repetition. To avoid sounding unnatural in your content, write more for humans instead of search bots, especially nowadays that AI is starting to behave more humanly than ever.
5.Article Spinning
Article spinning has been a long-frowned-upon black-hat tactic that attempts to recreate quality content with the help of a software that replicates content using different phrases, words, and organization—the end result being a jumbled mess of content that doesn’t say anything new compared to the source material. The best way to protect yourself from this is to invest in content production that results in articles that are helpful, unique, and of substance.
6.Exact match search targeting
Other tactic marketers used to bank on is targeting exact match searches in order to rank for them and increase traffic numbers even though the search query is irrelevant to the website or the business being optimized. This click-through rate booster may have worked in the past, but the practice can very well pull your rankings down as new algorithms discover the exact match search queries’ irrelevance to your website.
7.Thin content
Thin, stole, keyword-stuffed, duplicate, and irrelevant content will no longer cut it in today’s SEO landscape. Gone are the days when bad content has all the potential in the world to rank well in searches because it successfully games the system. Nowadays, it all boils down to content quality and relevance, which also requires paying attention to user experience instead of merely focusing on basic SEO elements like keywords and links.
Ensure that your SEO strategies are timely and effective by hiring a dynamic SEO agency that invests in continuous research and training. You can’t go wrong with SEOValley. We’re committed to proactive SEO.
