Since its inception, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a two-sided endeavor. For search engines, it has been an effort to deliver valuable, relevant content, and for marketers, it has been a race to rank on the first page for traffic. The two sides have repeatedly pushed one other to adapt and evolve, making web design and SEO optimization an ever-changing process. In brief, outdated SEO strategies which have worked before may not work today – as this article will help explain.
Establishing a Healthy SEO Foundation
First, before reviewing and updating your SEO strategies, it is vital to establish a healthy SEO foundation. Some practices offer timeless value toward a stellar online presence in principle or in action. Three among the most notable ones are the following.
#1 Monitor Your Website for Google Penalties
Initially, if you suspect undue SEO failures, checking for penalties is vital. In such cases, Digital Dot suggests that you take action right away to avoid damage from lower search engine rankings.
SEO penalties typically occur due to black hat SEO tactics, but not exclusively so. Thankfully, checking for manual penalties is easy; navigate to your Google Search Console dashboard, and from there to Security & Manual Actions>Manual actions. Algorithmic penalties are much harder to identify or remedy, often requiring professional SEO services to overcome.
#2 Diversify Your SEO Efforts
Second, it is always advisable to diversify your SEO strategies. Trends within your audiences, simple changes in marketing needs, and other factors may require different established SEO strategies to navigate.
For instance, beyond general SEO, you may consider:
- Local SEO, if you’re tapping into local markets
- Mobile SEO, as mobile traffic has overtaken desktop traffic
- Voice Search SEO, which SEO trends continue to favor
Diversification will not make up for outdated SEO strategies, but it will give you room to maneuver. If one approach begins to lag, you can lean on the others as you repair it.
#3 Offer Value Above All Else
Finally, delivering value and a great user experience has always been Google’s philosophy and primary goal. No matter how much its algorithms change, they consistently strive to meet this same goal – so you should too.
Trying to appease Google before your audiences rarely bodes well, as failed black hat strategies of the past show. Temporary traffic gains matter little when your audiences don’t value what you offer and don’t convert. So, it’s always best to please your audiences and customers before turning to satisfy bots and algorithms. As Google puts it, “focus on the user, and all else will follow.”
The List of Outdated SEO Strategies You Should Leave Behind
With these basic practices and principles in mind, we may now turn to specific outdated strategies. In no particular order, consider the seven that follow.
#1 Keyword Stuffing
Perhaps the most famous strategy of old in SEO circles was, and still is, keyword stuffing. In simple terms, keyword stuffing is when writers overuse their main keywords within a page or piece of content. This practice intended to game Google into ranking said content higher, but it rarely worked. Today, Google penalizes this practice, making it not just outdated but also harmful.
Users don’t quite appreciate keyword stuffing, either. In most of its forms, it’s pretty easy for human readers to spot – and it diminishes their experience. In turn, they leave such pages early, and the user engagement informs Google of its poor value.
If you’d like to know more about this practice, we’ve also written an article dedicated to keyword stuffing specifically.
#2 Fluffing Content Length
Perhaps just as famous practice is fluffing content. This practice relies on the flimsy premise that lengthier content ranks better in search engines, which SEOs have debated zealously. Over time, research concluded that valuable content ranks better – and length can facilitate value.
That’s not to say long content doesn’t rank better; it often does, as SEJ research finds. The crucial distinction here is that, in those cases, content ranked better because of its value and engagement signals. Outdated SEO strategies like fluffing content with needless text of little value to stuff more keywords into it fail. So, as highlighted above, you should instead strive to satisfy your users – no matter the content length it takes.
#3 Abusing Alt Text
Regarding keywords, another SEO feature that saw notable abuse was alt text. Alt text presented an opportunity to stuff more keywords into content, and image search rewarded this practice for a while. Today, Google values using alt text for its intended purpose of enhancing accessibility and frowns upon attempts to game it.
Alt text discussions emerged as companies and search engines sought compliance with the American Disabilities Act (ADA). In line with the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), Google increasingly values web accessibility as it enhances the user experience. Alt text, or descriptive image text for those who use screen readers, emerged as an excellent solution toward these ends. As such, Google now notices attempts to exploit alt text for SEO and does not reward them.
#4 Relying on High-DA Backlinks
Backlinks, the proverbial backbone of SEO, also deserve a due mention in such analyses. Also dubbed inbound links, backlinks offer contextual value and authoritativeness to content – alongside marketable traffic and higher engagement signals.
And yet, few outdated SEO strategies can be as harmful as overreliance on backlinks. Link farms and purchased links were already notorious black hat SEO techniques to avoid, but even valuable backlinks can harm. Value, in this case, is measured through the linking site’s Domain Authority (DA); high-DA backlinks serve as effective authoritativeness endorsements.
Still, Google distinguishes between DoFollow links and NoFollow links, ones that act as endorsements and ones that don’t. It values high-DA backlinks but is also very wary of shady backlink practices and can penalize unnatural-looking profiles. You should maintain a balance between DoFollow and NoFollow links instead of leaning on the former too heavily.
#5 Spamming Internal Links
Speaking of links, internal links also deserve mention, specifically, the ill-advised strategy of spamming internal links within your pages without offering contextual value. This strategy may have worked to some extent, but Google knows better now – and users too.
The practice emerged as a way to create topic clusters, as Ahrefs explains:
“Topic clusters help search engines better understand the hierarchy of your website. As such, they may help search engines see your site as an authority on a specific subject.”
A tight website structure is, by all means, beneficial; Google better understands your content, and users navigate it better. However, spamming internal links fails in both regards, as it neither offers contextual value nor does it satisfy human visitors. Instead, outdated SEO strategies only scramble the customer journey, causing users to leave in frustration. In turn, Google notes these poor engagement signals and only downgrades the website’s SEO score.
#6 Duplicating Content
This one is not an outdated strategy per se, as much as it is a failure to make a distinction. In brief, content creators still sometimes fail to distinguish content duplication from content repurposing. Recycling old content can undoubtedly work and boost SEO, as we’ve explored before, but content duplication only harms SEO.
In black hat SEO contexts, content duplication can occur in many different but equally unproductive ways like:
- Copying another website’s content
- Using the same content across different domains
- Duplicating the same page in different parts of your website
Still, it can also occur unwittingly or without ill intent, in such ways as:
- Duplicating product descriptions in eCommerce websites
- Publishing content under duplicate URLs on Apache servers by accident
- Publishing duplicated content submitted by guest authors
Such cases can still harm your SEO, so avoiding intentional and accidental content duplication is vital. You can repurpose old content meaningfully, but Google will penalize duplicated content.
#7 Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality
Finally, few outdated SEO strategies have seen such heated debate among SEOs as artificial content consistency. There is merit to a consistent schedule, but prioritizing quantity over quality will not work anymore.
Indeed, Oberlo cites HubSpot and others to assert that content output matters:
“Companies that publish at least 16 blog posts per month receive 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish fewer than four posts.”
And yet, they also stress the undeniable factor of content quality:
“Blogging statistics […] show that “quality of content” is rated the most important success factor among all bloggers.”
Indeed, Google values output consistency; it serves as reassurance of authoritativeness. It also values user engagement, and poor, mass-produced content can not beat well-researched quality content. As such, it’s often preferable to balance the two, prioritizing quality that satisfies users over plain output consistency.
Summary
To summarize, there are ample outdated SEO strategies to avoid in 2022 and beyond. Some, like spamming internal links, will frustrate your users and complicate their customer journey. Others, such as abusing alt text, will incur penalties from Google. And finally, ones like keyword stuffing will do both – harming your SEO and business alike.
SEO can be very complex, and we at Qhr Solutions understand that. If you’d like more information or want to inquire about our SEO services, please feel free to contact us today. With our help, you can overcome SEO obstacles, fine-tune your website, and take your business to the next level.
