Today, so many people engage in outdated SEO practices that are not worth the time anymore. Not only are they obsolete but also they can be so risky to use, having a negative impact on a website’s ability to rank well.
Using these outdated seo techniques may end up hurting you more than it helps.
The following are some of the SEO practices to avoid in 2019:
Submitting to Search Engines manually
In the past, updating your websites and then submitting them manually to search engines was something worth doing. However, we are past that now because web crawlers can discover your site without you having to go through all that trouble.
The fact that SEO experts are charging you for website submission should be avoided because it’s a waste of money that would end up costing you a lot to build your rank.
Just submit an xml sitemap to the bigger search engines like Google and Bing. That will automatically notify them of new pages/posts you publish on your site.
Link exchanges
Link exchanges have been outdated seo practices for some time now, but still worth mentioning as we still see seo’s doing this.
As the name suggests, it’s about exchanging links with other webmasters. They link to your site and you link to their site. Everybody wins, right? Well no, not exactly.
The problem here is that these links are reciprocal. Search engine algorithms are not counting these types of links as anything of value. Sites that link to each other do not help each other in rankings.
If you get a link and exchange it for something else though, it might be worth it. Just keep in mind Google’s policies state to not pay for links. So, you could offer a free article on their blog with a link included. That’s called a guest post and it works really well to get links to your site.
Link wheels
Linking wheel was a technique that was used in building links that would help in tricking search engines into ranking web pages higher using web 2.0 sites.
The primary focus is your website, but other websites are used as free options which can be interconnected to boost your ranking. However, it’s an outdated seo practice that can be easily identified by web crawlers. It’s not going to have much of a negative impact, but it’s also not really worth the time setting up.
Keyword Stuffing is Way Outdated SEO Practices
This used to be the way sites would get rankings a long time ago. But, this has been a bad technique for some time. When you are targeting specific keywords to rank for and fill your page with the same keyword over and over, it will have a negative impact.
Not only does it make the page ridiculous to the reader, it’s easy for search algorithms to pick up on this and de-rank your page. Getting good rankings is more about creating quality content for your readers. Stuffing your page with the same words over and over is not quality content.
What you should be doing is finding related keywords to the one you are targeting. You can google search your targeted keyword and notice at the bottom of the search page a list of related searches. Use those in your page as well as your targeted keyword and you will have much better results.
You don’t need to place your keywords in your page a specific amount of times. If it’s in the title of your page, alt text of your image and once or twice in the body, you’ll have a chance to rank well. There are other more important factors that go into getting good rankings. So don’t worry about how many times you add the keyword into the article.
Paid Links
As we mentioned before, paying for links is completely against Google’s webmaster guidelines. If they catch you buying links, your site will get de-indexed and there goes all your hard work.
Having said that, you can bet almost every seo agency at some point has paid for backlinks in some way or another. It’s really difficult for search engines to know which links are natural and which are not.
It might be rewarding to pay for links on certain sites, but it’s risky.
Buying Exact-Match Domains
This used to be a good way to get a site ranked well. If you’re targeted keyword is “Dallas Dentist”, then dallasdentist.com would have helped you get ranked for that search. But now, it has the opposite effect. You can still get domains like this ranked, but it takes much more work than it does a branded name domain for example.
So if you’re trying to decide on a domain name for a new website, go with some form of your targeted keyword included + a unique word that would form your brand. A good example is myidealdental.com.
Exact-Match Anchor Text
The text that is used for a link is called anchor text. It used to work amazingly well to go out and get tons of links with your targeted keyword as the anchor text. Now, that can hurt you more than it helps. It’s called over-optimizing.
Think about what we said about buying links. It’s hard for Google to know if your links are natural or paid for. Well, if you have all your backlinks using the same anchor text, that’s a pretty dead give away that your links are not natural.
A good, natural link profile will have a mixture of words being used as the anchor text. Mix it up with your targeted keywords and generic words like “website” or “view this…” or “click here for…”. On top of that, you want to use the url as anchor text a lot of times.
In Conclusion
The search engines are very advanced at this point, so it’s really hard to fool them with anything anymore. What works really well, is to stop thinking about how to game the system for better rankings and really consider how to keep your visitors on the page longer. That means creating engaging content and linking to your other pages for more relevant info.
When you start to pick up some momentum with more and more visitors, you will see a huge increase in rankings because your visitors are telling google how good your site is by staying on your site for longer periods and clicking on more pages.
Do you have any questions or anything to add to this? Want to tell me how right or wrong I am? Feel free to leave your comments below.
