How Outdated SEO Tactics Can Hurt Your Rankings

By: Team WTI | Date: April 3, 2020

Categories: Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization,

Tags: Google Algorithm, SEO, SEO Trends,

Once upon a time, you could trick Google into ranking your site higher in search results, but those days are long gone friends. This post outlines a few outdated SEO tactics that Google actually punishes sites for, so be sure to avoid using these approaches when creating content for your website!

Outdated SEO Tactic #1: Duplicate Content

Intentionally duplicating content, or creating multiple pages with slightly different title tags in an attempt to rank for a set of keywords is an outdated SEO tactic. This approach should not be used for many reasons. The main reason is that search engines will rarely show multiple versions of the same content in its search results for users anyway, so it’s best to just create one page, and pack it full with useful, unique content for visitors. In most cases, duplicate content is unintentional, but try to avoid having multiple pages or posts that are similar whenever possible because search engines don’t know which versions to include or exclude in search results for users.

Outdated SEO Tactic #2: Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing refers to writing content “optimized” for search engines, meaning that instead of writing sentences to be easily read by humans, the text was written for search engine bots. You can usually tell if someone is stuffing content with keywords because they might mention those words over and over again throughout their page or paragraphs. And while it might seem tempting to try to write content tailored to search engines, it’s not necessarily search engines that are determining rankings alone anymore. If users are consistently clicking on a page and immediately exiting, that tells Google that content isn’t useful or relevant, and therefore the page loses credibility.

Key Takeaway 

Instead of wasting tons of time trying to “beat the algorithm” in tacky ways, it is better to show up consistently with quality, sharable content. Search engines are getting better at understanding human language and semantics, so it’s almost useless to tailor a site for a set of rules that will probably change tomorrow anyway. Because at the end of the day, all search engines are trying to do is to deliver the best possible results to their users, every single time.

If you need help creating quality content for your website, blog, or social media, let us know! We’ll be happy to help!