It is well known that, in the world of SEO Positioning, those who do not update are condemned to ostracism.
This is due to the continuous evolution of search engines, which have been updated in their endless search for a better user experience. These changes directly affect the positioning factors, making many of the strategies and processes that, not long ago, could be very useful when positioning our website become obsolete, even to the point of harming our positioning instead of improving it. This is known as bad SEO practices and is, without a doubt, the main headache for all those websites that need to learn how to continue improving their positioning.
Many people today cling to “old habits” and use outdated SEO practices to improve their brand’s visibility and performance in search engines. This is a common mistake among SEO professionals just starting and small/medium-sized business owners who are still finding their feet in the digital world.
That is why in today’s article, we will look at all those SEO practices that, over time, have fallen into disuse:
Abuse of keywords
One of the most important points to take into account when looking for correct web optimization on our page is the keywords, which are, in turn, the main source of problems for those who are not entirely clear about the correct way to manage them.
Let’s look at some examples of bad practices that directly affect keywords:
Irrelevant keywords:
A common mistake among SEO technicians is to try to adjust all their content to the same keyword research, which results in almost always using the same keywords in all content, regardless of their fit with the specific topic of the article itself.
This causes the content of articles not to be tailored to users’ searches, encouraging brands to lose the attention of their visitors before even having the chance to communicate their real message.
t was sometimes different from this. Before Google Penguin, the massive presence of the same keyword made the search engine itself recognize these keywords as the website’s main theme, which helped enormously to position it. This was because the priority before was for websites to make the work of search engines as easy as possible. However, now it is essential to focus on different types of keywords to align with modern SEO strategies. For more than ten years, the only priority that search engines have taken into account is the user experience. They sacrificed for the customer, as they gave up many facilities to improve the quality of their services.
For example, in the case of companies specializing in digital marketing, it is common to include keywords such as “Web Design”, “SEO Positioning”, “Inbound Marketing”, etc. Indeed, these are the most crucial keywords. However, this doesn’t mean you should incorporate all of them in every article and piece of content. Use only those that align with the content you intend to publish at any specific time.
It is better to support our main keywords with other secondary keywords that are correctly adapted to our content so that you offer the reader exactly what they are looking for in each case.
Keyword Stuffing
In the so-called “prehistoric era” of SEO positioning, when everything was beginning, and neither search engines nor users knew exactly what to hold on to, the most common and effective practice to position your website was to publish the greatest number of keywords that you could include, either in the content itself or by hiding links through techniques that today are harmful to our positioning.
Google, and any other search engine worth its salt, no longer rely on keyword density to determine whether a website is an effective source for responding correctly to organic search results.
Nowadays, the aspects that determine your positioning are much more complex. Although a correct selection of keywords is still essential for correct positioning, the quality of the content and the structure of our website will determine our search results.
Talking to robots
One of the latest additions to Google’s complicated search algorithm is that content must be written naturally rather than as if you’re talking to a robot.
It is common to fall into the error that writing for the web means repeating the same topic by its proper name every time it is mentioned, looking for variations and different versions of our keywords for each of our contents. And the thing is… if I repeat my keywords repeatedly on different pages, I will get the search engines to classify me properly.
Big mistake…
For example, if you want to rank for the keyword “Web Design,” the correct process is to have a page on your website with high-quality content that deals specifically with it instead of including the keyword in all content that superficially deals with the topic.
It is harmful because if we include the same keyword too many times on different pages, we risk that the search engine will not recognize the page on which we address the topic of the keyword we use.
Buying articles and link directories
Something that is hard to learn but is essential if you want to progress is that any attempt to cheat the system only sometimes works in SEO.
This does not stop users from trying, especially when it comes to tactics that offer notable improvements to our website or our brand.
Article directories have long been one of the most effective methods for improving our visibility.
Commonly regarded as one of the earliest forms of digital marketing, article syndication offered great advantages to those who knew about it. And it made sense, as the idea was similar to other media channels, such as television or print media, that use advertising to sustain their businesses.
However, Google eventually realized what was happening and launched its revolutionary Panda update in 2011.
Panda has dramatically transformed the search environment by targeting and diminishing content farms, directories, and other sites with low-quality content.
In the current landscape, article marketing holds minimal value; instead, your high-quality content must be unique and showcase expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Spinning
A practice commonly performed with software, in which one tries to recreate quality content using different words, phrases, and compositions in order to publish it on different pages over and over again to gain traction.
While AI continues to improve every day in its role as a content creator, anything generated by a machine is still of a lower quality than what a human being can produce.
Search engines know this, so although it is still used sporadically, it is always preferable to have natural and original content written by a person.
Buying links
One of the oldest and most underused SEO techniques today is undoubtedly the direct purchase of external links, and even today, it is still seen as a common practice among many beginners in web positioning.
In fact, as with most SEO tactics, if a move looks suspicious, you should probably avoid it.
It used to be routine practice to pay to obtain a large volume of links pointing to your website to establish yourself in the search engines as quickly as possible.
Backlink profiles require regular maintenance and optimization, similar to the websites we oversee. Low-quality domains with excessive backlinks to the same site can jeopardize the site’s health.
Today, Google can identify these low-quality websites, which directly affect our positioning.
Nowadays, suppose you are looking. In that case,to help increase the authority and visibility of your page legitimately, you will need to obtain quality links generated in the most natural way possible and not pay a third party to create them manually and completely artificially.
Anchor text
Internal links are one characteristic that defines whether a website has a functional structure that generates a good user experience.
Typically, each internal link includes anchor text, an HTML element that informs users about the content they will encounter upon clicking the link.
Various types of anchor text exist, such as branded, naked, exact match, website/brand name, page title, and headline. However, the favorability of each type depends on its application and context.
Previously, utilizing exact-match anchor text with different keywords was the most straightforward method of achieving higher rankings. However, since the arrival of Google Penguin, identifying over-optimized content has become a thing of the past.
If the engine realizes that your priority is not users but convincing the search engine itself, you will need more help spreading your brand.
Outdated keyword research tactics
Keywords have certainly undergone drastic changes in recent years. In the past, every SEO specialist used to have a wealth of keyword-level data at their fingertips, which allowed us to see what was working well for our brand and what wasn’t and better understand the user’s intention when visiting our website.
Over time, various external tools seek to replicate our keyword data. However, it has been shown that no matter how hard they try, it is impossible to recreate it effectively.
No matter how well it works, every SEO specialist should do keyword research to tailor their keywords to the industry, geographic region, competition, etc.
Please note that this does not mean that you should not use keyword planners, but we must keep in mind that they only give us an idea, not a definitive list of keywords.
The most common tool for this purpose is the Google Keyword Planner because it is free and provided by Google personally, which assures us that we are on the right track.
Other paid but more complete options are Moz, Href or SEMRush.
Pages for each keyword variation
Another of the most used and best-performing techniques, but which today is part of bad SEO practices, is to include links in different parts of your website that point to a specific keyword and its variations (e.g., “SEO positioning,” “Web positioning,” “SEO,” “Search engine optimization,” etc.).
Algorithm updates such as Hummingbird and RankBrain enableto recognize differenthat t keyword variations and whether connected to the same topic.
For Google, each keyword must be located in your highest-quality content, which is also most useful to users who are interested in the specific topic for which they arrived at your website.
Nowadays, publishing several pages with the aim of distributing strength to the same keyword and its variants is considered little less than an act of cannibalism. With the changes made by search engines, the only thing you will achieve is distributing the same weight between several pages, which often results in none of them being positioned as we would like.
As with everything, user experience is the search engine’s top priority. That’s why it penalizes pages with links that point to the same site, regardless of their anchor text. It doesn’t want users to navigate a website looking at very similar content without knowing which one can really help them in their management.
Exact Match Domains
A common practice that can seriously harm us if not used properly is exact match domains. This involves including high-value keywords in the URL itself to gain a lot of strength when positioning our website.
This practice makes perfect sense… up to a point.
It is essential to ensure that all of our URLs, especially when including keywords like Types of URLs, are always placed on the page that provides the most information to the client about the keyword in question. If this is not the case, we run the risk of the search engine considering that the user experience on our website leaves a lot to be desired, which, as you may have already imagined, results in poor positioning.
Inappropriate content
To finish our guide on bad SEO practices, we have a classic of Black Hat SEO practices that never disappear, no matter how much time passes.
We call inappropriate content those that either do not correspond to what the user is looking for or are duplicate content that has been directly copied from other web pages. By changing a few words, they believe they can achieve all the strength of the one they are copying.
I’m afraid this has not yielded good results before or now. The fact is that any search engine worth its salt is perfectly capable of not only knowing if content is duplicated but also if it is too similar to other content already indexed by the search engine.
It’s one thing to get information and ideas from other articles and quite another to copy the structure, the points, and the index and only change a few words.
All quality work requires effort, and this is no different with your content.
Conclusion:
These are the bad SEO practices or, in other words, the obsolete SEO techniques that are still most common today despite their clear flaws.
For correct positioning, we must base our website on quality content and avoid situations that seek to force the search engine to do something, as this will normally backfire.
Remember… if you want to be successful, you must always prioritize user experience, which is the priority of all search engines.
