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What are some bad SEO methods that exist and are still being used today?

  • Everett Level X4
    • 8

    Write the reason you're deleting this FAQ

    What are some bad SEO methods that exist and are still being used today?

    Can you list any bad SEO methods that are being used, because people still think they work for ranking of their websites?

    #Seo #Myths SEO
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    TommyCarey

    TommyCarey

    lol I've had to fix so many problems with my clients websites What are some bad SEO methods that exist and are still being used today? I'll go over a few that I see every month.


    Keyword Stuffing:
    I've had so many of my clients hire me and then I have to take a week rewriting all their content because what they thought was a good way to write, was actually horrible and had tons of keyword stuffing. There are normally two types of keyword stuffing that I deal with and they are as follows
    • In content keyword stuffing - This is where they would write up a sentence and it would become jibberish because of all the keywords jammed into it. This will just obtain a penalty even though they think they're doing something right. The sentence looks horrible, but they think they're being tricky lol. For example, if their keyword was "Dog Wash" (without quotes obviously): Our dog wash service is the best dog wash because our dog washers are top notch!
    • In the footer keyword stuffing - Another bad one I see is when my clients jam as many of their keywords into the footer as they can. Normally when I see this it's for local businesses trying to get a specific town with their keyword into it and they place it in their footer because they read an article from 1999 saying this was a good thing to do. An example of this would be when I go to their site and se their "Service Areas" and they are Town A Cleaning Service, Town B Cleaning Service, Town C Cleaning Service, Town D Cleaning Service, and so on. There are ways to do this to avoid a keyword stuffing penalty, but a lot of new website owners won't bother making sub pages filled with optimized content on their keyword Town A Cleaning Service and the rest.


    Hidden Text:
    I don't see this one as much anymore because it's a pretty horrible way to try and trick the search engines. Hidden text is when someone puts a bunch of text, mainly keywords, into the background of their pages and they hide the keywords by making the font color the same as the background of the websites page. This is an extremely easy way to make Google, Yahoo! and Bing to hate you What are some bad SEO methods that exist and are still being used today?
    10 years ago

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    apsarasisodia

    apsarasisodia

    Except the things mentioned, I would like to include another method which has been used widely which should not be used by any professional SEO guy. It is called Directory submission. Google doesn't give heed to this method and so people should also not use it.
    10 years ago

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    Everett

    Everett

    I tend to think upon the same lines as most directory submission sites are spammed so heavily. Why would Google use such sites for their algorithm, if they are spammed so much? It wouldn't make much sense to use any site that allows users to create content to backlink to their websites, maybe perhaps with the exception of social media.
    10 years ago

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    MasterA

    MasterA

    For a long time, there are people who focus on quantity rather than quality. There were people who purchase 1000 blog comment backlinks and yet people still use these for their SEO. While, it may look like a very good package because they promise that all the backlinks are of high quality. However, 1000 high quality backlinks will cost a ton and if you do it all at once, even if the backlink is very high quality, it will still make your backlinks look spammy. Therefore, never focus on quantity and it is actually bad to focus on it too much.

    MasterA
    10 years ago

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    Everett

    Everett

    So services that promise one thousand high quality blog comment backlinks should be avoided at all cost? I often see some blogs are still spammed by thousands of people just for blog comment backlinks. It's pretty sad to see this, and hopefully the search engines penalized those websites that paid to get their links spammed.

    Sometimes, a user will spam a website's links only to cause harm to their SEO rankings, I've been aware of users offering their services to do exactly this. I wonder how a website could recover their ranking with the search engines, and remove all those spammy backlinks.
    10 years ago

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    EliteWriter

    EliteWriter

    1. Content that is too heavy with keywords. Keyword stuffing was okay years ago but it no longer is. It is better to focus on quality content rather than on packing it with keywords.
    2. Definitely the quantity of links over their quality. There are still many who think that many backlinks are just great. Since backlinks can be purchased, those who do not understand the reasoning behind their actual effect think that it is awesome to be able to purchase backlinks, and it is a quick way to get more traffic. But the reality is that your site could easily end up getting penalized as a result.
    10 years ago

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    Lynne

    Lynne

    Yes I've seen lots of people using all these old techniques and swearing by them. Especially buying loads of spammy, low quality links.
    10 years ago

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    Corzhens

    Corzhens

    I think when you find too many keywords in the content then it is obvious that you are stuffing. Maybe that is the result of the lack of information about SEO because in those days SEO was never heard of. But now we are aware that keywords that are more than 3% of the content is considered stuffing and can be harmful to your site’s search engine capability.
    8 years ago

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