The Past – SEO Tactics
As we all know, the fundamental objective of SEO in the past was to trick the search engines into giving a website better rankings. This was usually done for a very narrow set of high search volume keywords. Search engine optimization used to be a highly effective way to give businesses a massive boost in visibility. Because of the ease in tricking Google’s SERPs, it was very common to see a brand new business outrank very established companies for strategic keywords. If you agree SEO is dead,
The Now – Avoid SEO Tricks of the Past, or You Will Be Penalized Severely
This post will discuss SEO techniques that were effective in the past. If you use any of these tactics now, you will get an organic penalty placed on your site. If the marketing agency you’re using is doing any of the following tactics, you should run the other way as fast as possible.
- Comment Links
If you got started in the online marketing industry before 2008, posting comments links was probably one of the first things you learned. This is truly one of the most spammy, lame tactics ever practiced by SEO aficionados.
Comment links are based around many first generation blogs giving a backlink to the author title of a post response. Most of the time, people would list the author on their comment as a root keyword.
If you’ve been around for a long time, you’ll probably remember hearing about the D-List. This was a massive collection of super spammy blogs that gave rel=”dofollow” links in the author title.
- Article Marketing and Content Spinning
Article spinning was an amazing tactic for turning your three super low quality articles into 15 super duper low quality articles. This strategy was facilitated by software that would mix content into unique posts.
After the new pages were created, spinning tools would submit the content to mass article directories. These websites were basically just huge silos for hosting content. The content was never meant for human consumption. It was means to be crawled by google and pass a backlink back to the target site.
If you’ve been around for a while, you probably remember a few of these now infamous article directories.
- Ezine Articles
- GoArticles
- ArticleBase
- ArticleAlley
- Buzzle
It would be interesting to know how many pages of junk, worthless content were created using these methods.
- Build My Rank
How could you forget the good old days of BuildMyRank. Back in the day, this was the absolute, most amazing way to obtain top rankings.
BuildMyRank was built to exploit the value Google had placed on exact match links. They developed a genius method for taking orders, writing blog post, posting blog posts, and reporting the finished work.
It would be very interesting to know the number of posts that were created through the BuildMyRank network. The one thing you can be sure of is all of the websites in that, and other similar networks, have been completely deindexed.
The crash of BuildMyRank was the beginning of the end of old school SEO. When the owner of this network talked trash directly to Matt Cutts on Twitter, Google went after them with full force. That was really the last straw before Google declared full-scale extermination of spammy SEO.
- Profile and Forum Spam
Using forums to generate links was one of the lowest quality ways to try to generate offsite authority. Back in the day, it was very common to see companies build fake profiles with links in the bio. They would then have employees go create stupid, pointless threads in different forums
Profile and forum spam was one of the first things to go with the mass Google updates. It was very easy for the search engines to look at the user profiles generating these idiotic responses and threads to qualify them as spam.
- Mass Duplicate Pages
Creating huge numbers of duplicate pages was a tactic seen in lead gen and franchise based businesses. The idea was to create a different page for every state, county, city, and area code in the country.
This was a tactic seen on a mass scale for a number of years. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this strategy if you have real businesses with unique information. However, that took way too much effort for companies with this technique.
Most of the time when you saw businesses giving this a try it was based around creating one page of decent content. They would then duplicate that page several hundred times. The only thing that would change on the page was the city, state, zipcode, or county. It was a very ineffective way to try to get local rankings on a mass scale.
Conclusion
Low quality SEO will never be like it was back in the golden days of a much less complicated ranking algorithm. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from all of the changes is there’s really no shortcuts with quality online marketing. If you’re looking for a premium inbound solution, please visit www.digitalflavor.com.
If you found this article interesting, you also might want to read this post that debates is SEO truly dead.
