People have used lots of different SEO techniques over the past several years to make their sites rank on search engines, but SEO has changed a lot in the past several years. What once worked perfectly has now been weeded out by search engines like Google. For the most part, these changes are positive because they help prevent scam websites from using scam techniques to get to the top. They have also helped ensure that only the highest-quality websites reach the top of the ranks. However, online marketing experts suggest that you should be aware of these five SEO techniques that no longer work; that way, you can help ensure that you don’t use these scam techniques on your own site.
Leaving Spam Comments
If you have ever seen long, rambling comments posted over and over again on popular blogs, you know all about this technique. In the past, those who wanted to bring traffic to their sites used this tactic to help boost their search engine rankings and to bring in traffic from popular pages. Not only are site owners and website viewers used to these techniques, but search engines are too.
Creating Thousands of Backlinks
You might still see advertisements for companies that offer to create thousands of backlinks for a set price. In many cases, this price can be low, and it might seem like a great way to boost your backlink profile and cause your site to soar to the top of the search engine rankings. However, many of these backlinks are of a low quality, so this technique is no longer effective. Now, search engines can and often will penalize users for adding too many backlinks at one time. This is especially true if the backlinks are on non-reputable websites.
Keyword Stuffing
You probably already know that using keywords is an essential part of SEO, but how and where you use these keywords matters a lot. Although a lot of people were able to rank well by filling their content full of nothing but gibberish and keywords, this is no longer the case. Even if your articles are relatively well-written, using the keywords too many times or in an awkward manner can ruin your search engine rankings and cause you to be de-indexed.
Low-Quality Content
Some people use low-quality content on their websites that wasn’t written by Native English speakers or that simply doesn’t make a lot of sense. Some just don’t take the time to proofread their work or do their research. Although websites with low-quality content were once able to rank well just for having backlinks and keywords, this isn’t the case now. Instead, search engines look for websites that have helpful, informative and grammatically-correct content that their users will actually enjoy and learn from.
Unethical Coding
In the past, people used to use unethical coding to sneak keywords onto their websites without allowing their readers to see them, among other things. These things are penalized by search engines, however.