Outdated SEO Tips you Should Ignore

With most search engines taking a completely different approach to serving results and algorithms changing, what seems like, every day you wouldn’t be blamed for getting a bit mixed up with what constitutes as necessary SEO (search engine optimisation).

While there never will be a universal formula for SEO, there are, unfortunately, a handful of pointers that have somehow stood the test of time and seem to appear on most (outdated) SEO guides.

At a first glance, a few of these might seem like an alright idea, and if you’re new to SEO you may find yourself being suckered in by how easy they make SEO appear… but don’t be! In today’s SEO world, the points below are sure fire ways to get your site ignored by Google. Here are 7 outdated SEO tips you should ignore:

1. “Keyword stuffing will get you ranked in Google” –

No, it won’t. Google has been refining its algorithms for nearly 14 years; do you really think it wouldn’t have addressed the keyword stuffing issue yet?

Some people think there’s a fine line between keyword optimisation and keyword stuffing. I disagree; there is a huge difference between the two.

Optimisation is planning content themes, picking appropriate titles for pages, and writing informative meta descriptions. These all involve choosing precise individual keywords and long tailed keyword strings.

Stuffing is spontaneously/unnecessarily adding keywords to content, only including keywords in page titles and meta descriptions, and even matching keyword text to the background colour of the site so they’re not visible but still crawlable (Yes, people really do this.)

Google is very much aware of these practices and hundreds more that I haven’t mentioned (known as black hat SEO). Google will not rank these sites well. In fact, with the high level of sophistication Google’s algorithms show, and the introduction of content specific algorithms like Panda, sites conducting black hat SEO will be lucky if they’re repeatedly or frequently crawled at all.

Also on this topic, a personal pet hate of mine is bolding keywords. Back in 2001 it might have been the case that Google will see a bold keyword as a better indicator of the page context, but that certainly does not apply today. Bolding keywords within text will just make you look spammy and inexperienced in (modern) SEO.

2. “Excessive Link Building will improve your PR” –

No, it won’t. People have been fooled into thinking that participating in link building schemes; link farms etc. will quickly boost the PR of their site. This behaviour will do the complete opposite. Google has been aware of link farms for a long time now and has tweaked its Panda algorithm to detect sites like these, ignore them, or even remove them from the web.

Relevant link building can improve the ranking of your site but its vital that the sites you’re linking too, and the sites that are linking to you, all have related themes. When Google is crawling a site it looks at the context of each link to determine its relevance to the site.

If you’re a web hosting site and you have inbound and outbound links to a shoe retailer, Google will see this as irrelevant and could (in extreme circumstances) label you as a link farm, and at the very least it will have a negative impact on your ranking.

3. “Publishing your content on article sites is a good thing” –

No, it’s not. When Google finds a piece of duplicate content online, that is, exact content on 2 different websites, it will look at which site was crawled, cached, and indexed first in order to determine where the content originated from. (It also uses a number of other factors, including the presentation of content and its ease of readability to users, though this is subject to change.)

The chances are, if you need to put your content on an article site, your own website is of low quality or is poorly indexed, meaning Google could determine that the article site is the original author of your content.

Article sites will very, very rarely benefit businesses and are mostly users for individual writers, who perhaps don’t have a website, as an outlet for their work. As these sites usually have a much higher PR as well as a higher number of relevant linkbacks you’re likely to lose out on Google spots to them.

4. “Duplicating content on your site gives you more content…” –

No, it doesn’t. Google designed the Panda update specifically to target Content Farms; sites duplicating content or proving random paragraphs of short, irrelevant content (Google calls it ‘shallow’ content).

Duplicating content isn’t too different from keyword stuffing in a sense that there’s only so many times to need to present information before the message is understood. After so many keywords, Google ‘gets’ what you’re talking about, the same with content. Duplicating content suggests you may be spamming visitors with the same info.

It can also have an effect on your Google rankings; if you have duplicate content on multiple pages of your site Google will rank each page to determine which is the most relevant and of the highest quality. This could mean that you’re fighting your own site for higher rankings and Google could end up ranking your less important pages higher than others.

5. “Using the same metas and titles for all pages is okay” –

No, it’s not. Just about every SEO book you can get your hands on will tell you this is bad and goes hand in hand with the duplicate content issue above.

Page titles, header tags, and meta descriptions can be powerful SEO tools if written correctly. Google may use all of these factors to determine the context of a page and if these are incorrect, duplicated, or keyword stuffed, it could equate in negative ranking for your site.

Duplicating all of these factors across your whole site could also cause the same outcome mentioned in point 4; Google may rank (positively or negatively) the wrong pages or just see the duplicate content as spam and extend the time it takes to re-crawl your site. Always make sure you meta tags and headers are unique and relevant to the page.

6. “Focusing on your keywords is enough” – 

No, it’s not. While looking at keywords is (arguably) the easiest SEO practice, Google looks at a number of other things when awarding ranking scores and SERP positions. Unfortunately, there’s not a confirmed list of what these factors are (if we had that, we wouldn’t need SEO’s), however, after trialling things we can get a pretty good idea of what works.

Every year SEOmoz.org conducts a survey of SEO specialists to determine the prominent Google ranking factors and how they’ve changed since the previous year. In 2011 they asked 132 specialists what they thought these factors were, based on their personal experience. The results included (see image for the full list):

Analysis of site/page’s perceived value to users (this is a result of the Panda update)
Social signals at page level
Social signals at domain level
Usage data (CTR, bounce rate back to SERPs)
Content readability/usability/design
Presence and prominence of advertising vs content

You can see from a quick glance at some of the results that a lot more emphasis is being placed on social signals and quality of content than on onsite keyword usage. SEO is a site-wide endeavour, if you only focus on keywords you’ll be subject to a dramatic drop in traffic and visibility at any algorithm change.

7. “PageRank is an accurate signal of site quality and SERP position” –

No, it’s not. PageRank is a funny one; years ago most SEO’s believed that PR was a representation of the quality of a website and therefore its placement in SERPs. Nowadays there’s speculation as to whether it plays any role in ranking at all.

The common consensus is that PR doesn’t contribute to SERP positioning but can still contribute to the strength of inbound links (though this has not been proven). Whether or not this is the case, once again, it’s important to remember that there is a whole list of other factors that Google takes into account when determining site quality and SERP positioning. Relying on PR alone is very much an outdated mistake.