Community Discussion - What old-school SEO tactics no longer work? Which ones still do?

[MattRoney]

Hi there, friends!

This week's discussion comes from today's Whiteboard Friday:

Rand's outlined SEO practices that are outdated and no longer effective. Did anything catch you off-guard, making you want to pivot your strategy? Anything that you disagree with, or that you feel still works well regardless? What other tactics, in your experience, no longer work?

[EGOL]

From MOZ on-page grader...

"Recommendation: Edit your page to use your targeted keywords no more than 15 times."

I think that this is "old school advice" and have addressed it in detail in a recent Q&A question.

[solvid]

Hi,

I think keyword density is quite outdated. I've seen many people asking on Quora about optimal keyword density. I think this no longer applies. In fact, Matt Cutts has targeted this question like 5-6 years ago (here is a video), but, I still see a lot of folks trying to stuff their keywords everywhere. Hence, I think this point was missing on the latest WB Friday. However, I totally agree with other points mentioned.

[ChrisAshton]

My top five here:

1. Forced keyword placement. "You absolutely must get your exact-match keyword at the start of the page title."
2. Redundant pages for keyword targeting. "Create a page for each variation of your keyword(s) so you can rank for them all!"
3. **Content doesn't matter, as long as you have the keywords in there. **_"Nobody is going to read more than maybe 100 words so don't bother putting anything more than a paragraph or two on each page; Google is just looking for keywords" _
4. Content spinning on pages with a large volume of pages. _"Writing unique content for each page is a waste. Search engines are smart enough to read your content, the words just have to be moved around." _
5. Spending big money on exact match domains.

Seeing these is kind of amusing until you remember that some poor business owner paid hard-earned dollars for this outdated rubbish to be applied to their site.

[ChrisAshton]

Absolutely! I was berated by a prospective client last year when I politely informed him that out content team don't write to keyword density these days and focus on the user experience instead.

His response: "I've heard enough; you should think about at least reading an SEO book if you're going to take people's money for it!" [slams down the phone]

Dodged a bullet!

[MoosaHemani]

There are few tips that people discuss over and over again and in my opinion they are obsolete and does not work anymore.

Keyword Density: The idea of using exact keyword in the body tag certain time is something that tools like Yoast and Moz still recommend but in my opinion they aren’t important any more.

I mean Google is smart, they know what the page is talking about regardless of the fact that you are using exact match key phrase or not. For example if your exact match keyword is “excitement” and in the body you use synonyms probably Google will still find out what you are talking about and rank you accordingly.

Exact Match Domain: Again, a boring idea. I mean they maybe a small effect of having a keyword based domain name but saying that this will help you beat your competitors or that will take you to the first page of Google is nothing but a crazy talk.

These are the two ideas that I think people should stop talking about and focus more on creating something that their actual persona want.

Adding my 2 cents.

[mattdinbrooklyn]

When I first did SEO, my boss showed me different site to buy links from as well repurpose content. I would write content frequently with the hope of generating links on platforms like ezine and hubpages. Now I've found that marketing works so much more effectively to generate good links and the money spent on link building could be better suited for other purposes.

Also I think that Panda and Penguin did an excellent job of forcing people who did SEO to go clean. It's more about setting up a link strategy that scales to a larger area where the amplification will increase instead of gaining individual links at a budget that always seems more money than it's worth.

[MattRoney]

That's a valid point. I'll make sure our Product folks have seen it.

[Bill.Sebald]

Great topic.  I wrote a post about this a few years ago - love to hearing the answers for 2016.

2 old school tactics that I think do still work are:

1. Title tag optimization - I don't mean positioning of the keyword, count, etc., but the power of keywords in the title is still pretty remarkable considering most things that are easily spammable were ultimately deprioritized by Google.

2. PageRank sculpting - "Crawl Budget sculpting" may be apt, but sculpting the bots path is still incredibly valuable.  We do it all the time in our technical work, and there's often a measurable result. In my opinion, the more Google improved their ability to crawl the entire site, the more they learned the reasons to lean away from some sites' sections. Giving only the proper paths to Google keeps it simple for them.

[MattAntonino]

I always find these discussions interesting mainly because of the "nobody knows" factor.

What I want to point out more than any one particular thing is that there are a limited number of 'ranking factors.' Whether that number is 200, 50, 3, or 3000, it's limited. Whenever one tactic loses its effectiveness simple math says that other factors increased in importance.

Google is very, very good at messing with SEOs.

If keyword density is limited or removed, something took its place. Something that isn't "create quality content."  Most serious competitors are creating high quality, relevant content. If you think the difference in ranking one bank over another is "quality content" on a target page for "home loan" you're lying to yourself. Backlinks, age of the page, age of the site, internal links, anchor text, and some level of "keyword density" (though I think it's much more sophisticated than that" definitely helps. H1s still matter, as do H2s and H3s, tbh.

I have competitive keywords ranking with NO on-page content AND no backlinks. The page literally has a title, H1 tag and the surrounding menus & sidebars. It ranks for gambling-related keyphrases in a supposedly hard to rank niche and has ranked for months (with zero on-page text.)

SEMRush shows that same site rank for over 1200 keyphrases. It has ONE backlink to the homepage. That's it.

I wish that was the only example. But I am ranking semi-competitive marketing & SEO related keyphrases on a site with about 8 links and virtually no content. If content + links = SEO, these would never rank. So again, it's beyond that. Age of the domain? No, one is brand new. One is older. One is registered for more than a year, one for less. One is an EMD, one is not.

We've had new clients struggle & struggle to rank for really easy keyphrases with no backlink spam, technical on-site looks good and titles/content/links are all in line with other (ranking) clients. We put all their content on a new domain & it ranks just fine. NO links.

SEO is just weird. Let's face it - we're all attempting to do the best we can for clients but at the end of the day, none of it truly makes that much sense.