4 Outdated SEO Techniques To Run Away From
One of the super fun things I get to do here at Adster Creative is website audits. We look at a potential client’s website to see what improvements can be made and see if there’s anything really wrong behind the scenes. Overall we try to identify customized opportunities for your business, both onsite and offsite, for how you can grow and get as close as possible to world domination!
In doing these audits, we’ve seen. some. things.
Namely, some pretty bad things that a previous SEO company (and I do use that term losely) did to or ‘at’ a client’s site that caused some pretty big problems. We might refer to these kinds of things as black hat SEO, or sometimes grey, because sometimes it happened innocently enough. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. Come, learn, and if you see these things on your site or recommended to you, RUN far far away (into the arms of an Adster team member, preferably).
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Bad links
These can appear in many forms:
- the comment section of multiple blogs (like Blogspot or WordPress)
- links from multiple websites that look similar and have similar content/domains
- links from websites in languages or from countries that you don’t typically serve
Usually the issue here is volume. If you have a few links from a Russian website, probably not a huge deal. But 12,000? Eek!
How do you find these things? Search Console! Search Console should be your best friend, second wife, or at least, your very respected aunt that you realize knows a lot, even if you don’t really understand most of what she’s saying.
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Duplicate content
Another really common one! This is content lifted from somewhere else, maybe a supplier (say, if you’re a painter, taken from the paint manufacturer’s website) or (gasp!) a competitor. Google does not enjoy this as it’s not sure which version to rank, among other reasons. No one likes being confused!
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Keyword stuffing
We’re Edmonton’s best window installers. We install Edmonton’s best windows. If you want the best window installers in Edmonton, call the expert window installers at Windows-R-Us!
This just reads wrong, doesn’t it? Keyword density is a very old school SEO tactic that has somehow made it’s way into 2017. Do not do. If it doesn’t read properly, it’s probably not a good idea. It is much better to have great, useful content, optimized metadata (avoid stuffing that meta title as well!) and alt tags on images for dat Googlebot to read.
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Invisible text
This is my favorite, because it’s sooo dumb and looks super silly! Using black text on a black background (ha!), hiding words behind an image (lol!), making a font very small (lolololol) – basically anything that you think makes your text/links hard to see is considered hidden text and is a major no no and violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Of COURSE this is bad! Come ON girl this is soooo sketchy! It goes hand in hand with keyword stuffing. Don’t try to hide a bunch of keywords in font size 0 in blue on your blue background. You will not sell more puppies/homes/bricks.
These are pretty tame, in that we see them a lot and they’re pretty easy for most users to get wrapped up in and execute on their own. Next time I’ll go into some extra scary, extra advanced, extra baaad techniques to avoid, that you should run even faster away from!
Are you experiencing any of the above symptoms? Contact your local SEO agency for immediate diagnosis and treatment.