Most SEO advice online was pretty good when it was written, but there’s a lot which is past its sell-by date. The trouble is, many articles are undated, and quite a lot of outdated ones still appear high up in the search results. So you need to be as careful about when advice was written as you do to who wrote it.
Here are a few things you might find online still which no longer work, as well as a few which never did, but which remain tempting for many website owners:
- Creating pages for every tiny search term variation
- Repeating the search terms on a page multiple times
- Writing to an arbitrary optimal word count
- Encouraging links in quantity rather than relevance
- Using contrived phraseology to shoehorn in search terms
- Rewriting the same articles with different wording
- Using ‘exact match’ domains (where the domain name is the search term)
- Stuffing – or even bothering with – the keyword meta tag
Someone will probably say: “But Chris, you recommended this one back in 2011”, or something like that. However, this rather makes my point. Search engines have come on a lot since then. This blog will remain archived online, gathering dust, regardless.