Community Discussion - What old-school SEO tactics no longer work? Which ones still do?
-
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Rand's outlined SEO practices that are outdated and no longer effective.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?
-
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.
-
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
That's a valid point. I'll make sure our Product folks have seen it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
My top five here:
- Forced keyword placement. "You absolutely must get your exact-match keyword at the start of the page title."
- Redundant pages for keyword targeting. "Create a page for each variation of your keyword(s) so you can rank for them all!"
- **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" _
- 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." _
- 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.
-
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.
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO's Structuring Your Work Week
Hi I wanted some feedback on how other SEO's structure their time. I feel as though I'm falling into the trap of fire fighting with tasks rather than working on substantial projects... I don't feel as though I'm being as effective as I could be. Here's our set up - Ecommerce site selling thousands of products - more of a generalist with 5 focus areas. 2 x product/merchandising teams - bring in new products, write content/merchandise products Web team - me (SEO), Webmaster, Ecommcerce manager Studio - Print/Email marketing/creative/photography. A lot of my time is split between working for the product teams doing KWD research, briefing them on keywords to use, checking meta. SEO Tasks - Site audits/craws, reporting Blogs - I try and do a bit as I need it so much for SEO, so I've put a content/social plan together but getting a lot of things actioned is hard... I'm trying to coordinate this across teams Inbetween all that, I don't have much time to work on things I know are crucial like a backlink/outreach plan, blog/user guide/content building etc. How do you plan your time as an SEO? Big projects? Soon I'm going to pull back from the product optimisation & try focussing on category pages, but for an Ecommerce site they are extremely difficulty to promote. Just asking for opinions and advice 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey3 -
Old product URLs still indexed and maybe causing problems?
Hi all, Need some expertise here: We recently (3 months ago) launched a newly updated site with the same domain. We also added an SSL and dropped the www (with proper redirects). We went from http://www.mysite.com to https://mysite.com. I joined the company about a week after launch of the new site. All pages I want indexed are indexed, on the sitemap and submitted (submitted in July but processes regularly). When I check site:mysite.com everything is there, but so are pages from the old site that are not on the sitemap. These do have 301 redirects. I am finding our non-product pages are ranking with no problem (including category pages) but our product pages are not, unless I type in the title almost exactly. We 301 redirected all old urls to new comparable product, or if the product is not available anymore to the home page. For better or worse, as it turns out and prior to my arrival, in building the new site the team copied much of the content (descriptions, reviews, etc) from the old site to create the new product pages. After some frustration and research I am finding the old pages are still indexed and possibly causing a duplicate content issue. Now, I gather there is supposedly no "penalty", per se, for duplicate content but a page or site will simply not show in the SERPs. Understandable and this seems to be the case. We also sell a lot of product wholesale and it turns out many dealers are using the same descriptions we have (and have had) on our site. Some are much larger than us so I'd expect to be pushed down a bit but we don't even show in the top 10 pages...for our own product. How long will it take for Google to drop the old and rank the new as unique? I have re-written some pages but much is technical specifications and tough to paraphrase or re-write. I know I could do this in Search Console but I don't have access to the old site any longer. Should I remove the 301s a few at a time and see if the old get dropped faster? Maybe just re-write ALL the content? Wait? As a site note, I'm also on a Drupal CMS with a Shopify ecommerce module so maybe the shop.mysite.com vs mysite.com is throwing it off with the products(?) - (again the Drupal non-product AND category pages rank fine). Thoughts on this would be much appreciated. Thx so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mcampanaro0 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Community of Recipes
If i have a community of recipes where there may be multiple recipes of a cheesecake uploaded by different users, what would you recommend me to do ? does it affects me as duplicated content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vicrojas0 -
Video SEO for Google
I was wondering what the prime factors were to make something rank for a video on Google. Does anyone have any suggestions? I think that length may be important, but I don't know what the ideal run time is. Hypothetically for local SEO, would I be better off doing a tag like "Mercedes Buffalo NY" or do individual tags of "Mercedes" and "Buffalo" Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oomdomarketing0 -
Rel=Canonical to Longer Page?
We've got a series of articles on the same topic and we consolidated the content and pasted it altogether on a single page. We linked from each individual article to the consolidated page. We put a noindex on the consolidated page. The problem: Inbound links to individual articles in the series will only count toward the authority of those individual pages, and inbound links to the full article will be worthless. I am considering removing the noindex from the consolidated article and putting rel=canonicals on each individual post pointing to the consolidated article. That should consolidate the PageRank. But I am concerned about pointing****a rel=canonical to an article that is not an exact duplicate (although it does contain the full text of the original--it's just that it contains quite a bit of additional text). An alternative would be not to use rel=canonicals, nor to place a noindex on the consolidated article. But then my concern would be duplicate content and unconsolidated PageRank. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo0 -
Do we have to do different work for SEO for an affiliate site than for a normal blog?
I am interested to do the SEO work for an affiliate site. Is it same as others or something particular has to be done for affiliate sites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raybiswa0 -
Local SEO for franchises
I have a client who franchises an ice cream shop. It started in Utah and there are several stores there. They are ranking well for local searches based in Utah. Now they have opened a store in Federal Way, WA. How can I get the new location to rank for local keywords on the same website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fivestarfranchising0