This blog is going to explain certain old and outdated search engine optimization tactics ranging from harmless but ineffective all the way to completely devastating. These tactics are meant to be avoided by every SEO professional seeking better rankings and results of websites.
Article Directories and Links
Link directories are known to be irrelevant nowadays, with the exception of top-quality, niche-specific directories that generally follow certain strict guidelines. Long before search engines were as effective as strong since they are nowadays, link directories served as a way of categorizing sites so that people could in fact easily find what they were searching for. The credit goes to the simplicity of installation of using the software that powers them, marketers’ insatiable appetite for quick and easy links, and also websites owners’ hunt for certain additional revenue streams.
The directories and links are ineffective and don’t offer the desired outcomes and this is the reason why they quickly lost their popularity. Article directories are in fact worse. There are some marketers who just used them for quick and also easy links. Indeed, the glut of low-quality content flooding the website through these article directories appeared to be the proverbial straw the broke the camel’s back right before the release of Google’s algorithm.
Exact-Match domains
When it comes to exact-match domains, these were used to be a hot topic as they become a silver bullet for search engine optimization. It was quite convenient to throw up a microsite on an exact domain and also rank far more quickly compared to a traditional, branded domain, often in weeks, sometimes in days.
Exact-match domains are said to be having the potential to rank and also any other domain, but they also seem to have a higher potential to be flagged as spam, either algorithmically or manually. They, in fact, become an even riskier proposition especially when you consider that they are not as branded and as a result.
Reciprocal Linking
Search engines view an important link to another website as a vote for this site. Worse yet, rather than links embedded within quality content, these important links were quite often simply dumped on a “links” or “resources” page, sometimes damaged into categorical pages, along with numbers of other links, providing no value to any visitors.
Flat URL Architecture
This is certainly not a tactic as much as it is just the default way WordPress is set up, and also the majority of people are not aware of they need to change the same. The fact is that a flat URL structure in fact makes it tough for those of search engines to understand the hierarchy of your site since all of your pages are then treated with the same level of importance, especially while a faceted or also nested URL structure clearly communicates the importance of every page within your site in relation to every other page within your site.
Indiscriminate Guest Blogging
Meanwhile, it has indeed changed dramatically. In order to understand the great context, it is important to get details about the guest blogging. The fact can’t be denied that guest blogging has important roots in certain traditional public relations. The most important premise is that you try to leverage a larger, existing audience by publishing your article in an established publication.
There are many website owners who attempt to keep Google happy by constantly adding fresh and quality content was all too eager to publish a steady stream of posts from guests authors, and also mainly because links are indeed the lifeblood of search engine optimization.
Keyword Stuffing
When those of search engines were only able to interpret some simple signals, like keyword density, stuffing keywords by the truckload into a website page of making it seem more relevant was all the rage.
Exact-Matching Anchor Text
The anchor text distribution for natural links profiles will certainly have a wide variety. That is mainly because if 100 different persons linked to the same page on your site, every link would likely be used in different contexts within their content. One individual might in fact link to your website page with the use of anchor text that generally describes the product, while another may, in fact, link using anchor text that generally describes the cost, and also yet another might in fact link with the use of nondescript anchor text.
A page for Keyword Variation
Keyword phrases, in traditional thinking, are indeed dead. The old approach basically involved creating a completely separate page for every keyword variation, but fortunately, search engines are indeed a lot smarter nowadays, so this is indeed not necessary. Today, there are still some websites that generally follow this great tactic perform a lot like the zombie hordes you see mindlessly wandering around.
Therefore, rather than creating a personal page for every important keyword phrase you wish to rank for, you can create a more comprehensive page for a keyword topic.
Paid Links
Paying for PageRank passing important links has been a clear violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines for a long time. You might, in fact, think that you can be of course careful – purchase only a few links for getting some traction and also stay under Google’s radar. They are in fact hunting for both link buyers and also link sellers, and it is of course shockingly easy because all they need to do is to follow these important links.
Inferior Quality Content
Effective SEO needs you to daily produce amazing content that is indeed tough for time-strapped marketers. In today’s time, simply producing content only for the sake of publishing something are, fortunately, far behind people thank Google’s Panda Update. All you need to do is to use superior quality content that should be perfectly written, engaging and accurate.
Automated Link Building
When those links become a necessary part of SEO, marketers predictably sought methods of enhancing their link-building efforts with the use of a variety of automated software programs. They, in fact, blasted their important links into the guest books blog forums and comments, submitted their sites to bookmarking services and also link directories and also spun poorly written articles by thousands, for submission to every important article directory they could easily find.