You should often ask yourself this, especially when optimising your website.
With the constant advancement of the Web, top search engines (particularly Google) also keep on evolving. From time to time, they introduce algorithm updates that directly affect the current practices of many Web masters.
As an SEO marketer, I have been privy to such struggles, causing me to overhaul my methods to make way for new ones. While it is not easy peasy, I do my best to keep up with any development, especially with Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.
If you not so familiar with the advanced mediums, strategies, and platforms online, you may have little idea about our topic today.
This is why we are going to talk about outdated optimisation techniques and their respective alternatives. Check out the following ideas to see if these might be useful to you.
Keyword Stuffing
Do you randomly add search terms to your articles in the hopes of quicker indexing and higher ranking in search engines?
Is this a good idea?
The answer is no.
It used to be an effective strategy several years ago, but it can lead to a penalty from search engines these days. What is more, it can cause a high bounce rate, which happens when the visitors leave the landing page immediately because they do not find the content relevant.
The Alternative
Use keywords sparingly. Instead of spending too much time integrating your targeted terms, focus on the following aspects:
1) a highly informative topic;
2) a unique and interesting approach;
3) a connection to your niche.
As a rule of thumb, write sensible posts and avoid repetition or redundancy.
Low-Quality Link Building
You probably know that links are crucial for gaining visibility and ranking in SERPs. But are you aware that some Web masters are opting for a short cut by linking with spammy websites?
Although this tactic is quick and easy, it may have your site penalised.
The Alternative
Do not hasten the process. Instead, allow the links to come naturally. Maybe you can follow established and trusted sites in your niche. You can join their network and comment on their content. When they see that you are worth mentioning, they might just link to your website.
Furthermore, do not randomly place links on your articles, especially if you want to place references. What you should do is integrate these properly to the right webpages.
Finally, do not fill your pages with internal links. According to Google’s design and content guidelines, you have to keep the amount reasonable. Additionally, “every page should be reachable from at least one static text link”.
Submitting to Link Farms
Also called free for all (FFA) pages, submitting your URLs to these portals provides you with instant inbound links. However, search engines are strongly against this method.
Now why is this bad?
First, these websites hold no authority at all.
Second, there is no limit to the number of links, which you can submit.
Third, there is no emphasis on the URLs’ importance or relevance to the readers.
Finally, they are crammed with keywords and ads that do not even relate to the content.
The Alternative
You can submit to Web directories. But note that you need to practise care when taking on this strategy.
To be safe, you must choose a portal that is specific to your niche. Additionally, it must already have gained the trust of Google and other major search engines. Remember these things may just provide you with additional links needed to boost your site in SERPs.
Overdoing Blog and Forum Commenting
Another short cut to gaining backlinks is adding your feedback or remarks with links. I am not saying that this is entirely bad. In fact, it can lead quality traffic to your site.
The main problem is in overdoing it through posting comments on unrelated blogs or placing your links outright instead of starting a casual conversation.
Since search engines check and analyse your links, they will find out that you are spamming and may remove you from results pages.
The Alternative
Find blogs, forums, and/or discussion boards that tackle the same topics as your site. This way, you can give relevant comments. And, if you are able pique the other users’ interests, they might just ask for your link.
Cloaking
Even the name itself sounds ominous, does it not? This method involves showing search engines different content from the one you provide to the visitors. Several website owners do this by means of JavaScript redirect or “doorway pages”.
The Alternative
Show the same content to search engines and readers. It is as simple as that.
Final Thoughts
Based on the insights I have just presented, it goes to show that you need to keep up with the Internet’s and search engine’s fast-paced changes.
Ensuring this is the best way that you can make your website stand out from the plethora of other domains.
About Emma
Hi Emma,
thanks for your tips. People underestimate proper SEO techniques. They want everything very fast – so we have link farms, not related links from poor quality websites and even very stupid (at this moment) keyword stuffing overoptimization.
But on the other hand, we shouldn’t forget about SEO and keywords – what is good for our readers should be also good for us and search engines
Chris
Chris recently posted..Market Samurai – Review of Great Tool for Online Marketers and SEO Specialists
Hello Chris
Thanks for your appreciation, and thanks too for sharing your ideas on the topic. You are right; we must always apply SEO strategies for the sake of our readers, our site, and the search engines. These are important factors.
Hi, Emma! Good pointed. We should be aware of Google Updates – they change the rules faster than we change our socks! Black hat SEO techniques are out of question nowadays. The last thing we want is to be penalized in SERP.
Cristian Stan recently posted..Best Sewing Machine Reviews 2012
You are right, Christian. We should avoid black hat techniques when optimising our site. And the best way to do this is to follow webmaster guidelines at all times.
Thanks for your additional insight.
My pleasure, Emma. Like I said, you wrote an awesome article and I just had to add my two cents.
Cristian Stan recently posted..Best Commercial Espresso Machine
Hi Emma,
Thanks for providing these tips. This is definitely going to be a great help for all the SEO Specialists. Yes, you are correct we must keep our SEO techniques updated like applying less keywords in our content as excessive use of keywords in our content is not appreciated by Google. Secondly, I also feel the same that blog commenting is good as suggested by the Google tips but not obviously overdoing it. These all the tips we must keep in mind or else our SEO concept would be considered as outdated. Thanks for the update!!
You’re welcome and thanks for the appreciation. I’m glad you find my post helpful.
All points are very true, all above techniques was outdated after google started google panda search engine changes algorithm. Now guest posts and content only can help I think.
Sai Krishna recently posted..Official Announcement: Androidbent Is on New look now!
Yes, you’re right, useful and engaging content as well as guest posting can help. As a note though, we must not overdo the latter (guest posting). What is more, we have to make sure that we write only for relevant blogs.
To keep up with Google’s algorithm changes these days, we must always look out for updates. And, given that Panda and Penguin prefers user-friendly websites rather over-optimised ones, we need to keep our target audience in mind when applying SEO techniques.
Thanks for sharing your insights.
Thank you for the great tips! We should keep updating our SEO techniques to keep up with Google. I believe commenting and link submission is very important!
Yes, commenting and link submission are important. But we must not focus too much on these strategies. What is more, we must only submit our website URL to credible directories. As for our comments, we must do it on sites related to our niche.
Thanks for the appreciation and thanks for telling us your ideas.
Hey Emma, good pointed and thanks for the tips but what about google panda ..:(
Karan recently posted..Samsung to launch Android Galaxy S Camera
You’re welcome. Google Panda and Penguin won’t affect our SERP ranking as long as follow Google’s webmaster guidelines. With these algorithm updates’ emphasis on optimising our site for the users, the only way we can avoid possible penalties is to do what SEO masters recommend.
Great post Emma – Although a lot of my niche sites were hit hard with Google algo changes, I think in the long term I’m glad they happened because a lot of the “me-too” people looking to make a quick buck online are giving up and the persistent and hard-working people will be able to profit online.
Thomas
Thomas recently posted..My 5 Best Productivity Tips for App Developers
That’s a good thought you have there. With such website owners out of the way, we have a higher chance of getting good ranking and our efforts will pay off.
Thanks for your wonderful insight, Thomas.
Thank you for this post Emma. You are right, SEO is an ever changing game and it’s super important to keep adapting in this industry. The days of low quality, and unrelated spam links is coming to an end. Link building should focus on contributing value to the internet and getting a link should be secondary to this.
Nancy recently posted..Simple Tips for Following a Healthy Diet Plan
You’re welcome, Nancy, and thanks too for sharing your ideas on our topic.
SEO strategies will give you better result without any doubt but the thing is that how you will use them into your seo work if you will go with white hat seo techniques then all things will come in your favor but beside that if you will do these same things under Black hat SEO then it will prove so bad for you.
Sam recently posted..India Trips
Exactly, Sam! The success of our SEO campaign depends on the strategies we use. Thank you for adding these insights.
i want to shift from blogger.com to wordpress due to availability of lots of Plugins…Will it hamper my SEO strategies?Am i on the right track?I am fresher in blogging ..need your guidance!!
Anup recently posted..MBA Jobs
In a way, a new blogging platform can affect your SEO strategies, that is, if you don’t know how to use the service given that you have to apply on-site optimisation. But if you are familiar with its functions and features, then you won’t have any problem optimising your blog pages.
Good luck on your blogging efforts!
Hi Emma,
I used to buy blogs that were being flipped by owners because they were not earning from them. I then used these websites as link farms for all the weblogs I have. I then publish a variety of topics along with backlinks covering the different niches that I have. This somehow worked in the past. However, it seems Google caught on with this type of tactic. Although my sites were never banned by Google (thankfully), somehow, the traffic that I was getting in the past declined significantly.
With the introduction of Google Panda and Penguin, content farms and link farms don’t have a place in the top SERPs anymore. We really have to be careful with our optimisation strategies these days.
Thanks for sharing your experience with us, Felicia. Other bloggers, who are doing the same, can learn a lot from this.
SEO is always going to be changing. Just take a look back at what worked 2 years ago. They are not even relevant now. Profile links, forum links, blog spam, low quality sites (private blog networks), and buying sitewide links.
Mix it up and use link diversity more than ever now. Also, its a good idea to read SEOmoz blog and even subscribe to their tools. Slow and steady gets results not spamming and doing stuff that looks unnatural.
Also Emma, I retweeted your post
Garen
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Thanks for commenting Garen. And for retweeting my post!
I like your idea that “SEO is always going to be changing.” It is indeed always evolving and as professionals in the field, we must always stay updated of the most effective methods. 
these techniques are outdated since a really long time ago.