Sarah
Keeping up with the latest SEO tactics is a must for any digital marketer, but it can be hard to identify the problematic “tricks,” like keyword stuffing, from the useful ones. Over the years, many SEO strategies have been used that were questionable at best, and now they’re more likely to backfire than they are to increase your rankings.
Keep reading to learn about four SEO tricks that cause more harm than good.
The End of Keyword Stuffing
In the olden days of keyword optimization, people would try to fit as many keywords into their content as possible to raise their keyword density, which is the ratio of keywords to other words in the text.
Keyword density is still an important factor in SEO, but it’s a concept that works much better in moderation. If you try to use the same (or similar) keywords every 20 words, the page won’t flow naturally, the user experience will be down the drain, and it’s likely that it will negatively affect your site’s ranking.
The algorithms behind search engines’ ranking systems are more advanced than they’ve ever been, and your best bet is to use a lot of variety and add in more sub-topics and semantically related keywords.
Hiding Keywords and Links in Plain Sight
Akin to changing the font size of a few punctuation marks to meet the length requirement on a school paper, many digital marketers once used a ‘blend into the background’ trick back in the days of simpler search engine algorithms.
People would add text to their webpage that was the same color as their background in order to hide it from website visitors while still appealing to the search engines. This was an alternative method of keyword stuffing and was also a way for people to add hidden links to help boost their ranking without affecting the user experience.
Google and other search engines don’t take too kindly to this sneaky strategy, so it’s best to keep your text visible to the naked eye!
Reusing Content (Purposefully or Accidentally)
Of course, reusing other people’s content is never the right move. It used to be a relatively common practice to use others’ blog posts and scramble them up to mimic an original piece of content, but this is quite easy to detect now.
Here’s the real doozy when it comes to reusing content: you need to be careful about reusing your own! It’s easy to reuse your own content in various places on your website, but this can actually cause confusion when search engines are trying to analyze each page and credit authority. Even an article description that’s posted in various places across your website might cause trouble (Ex: a description that is used as a teaser on your main blog page and as the intro to a specific article.)
Abusing Anchor Text
This is another outdated trick that you might be doing unintentionally. Anchor text refers to the words that are used to link to something within the text. For example, according to Ahrefs, some of the main kinds of anchor text variations are exact matches, phrase matches, partial matches, branded links, and naked URLs. The anchor text in this case is “the main kinds of anchor text variations.”
If the majority of your anchors are exact matches (the exact keyword that you want to rank for), this can seem a bit questionable to search engines. The best course of action is to not abuse anchor text as a search engine manipulation tactic, and rather try to ensure that you have several different anchor variations associated with your web pages.
Your pages should be linked to your brand name, phrases and statistics, a variety of keywords, common expressions like “visit this website to learn more”, etc. This variety helps you rank and keeps up your credibility.
In Review
SEO strategies are always changing as the search engine algorithms change, and there are a few old tactics that you should stay far away from. The days of keyword stuffing, invisible links, reusing content, and questionable anchor text tactics are over. Don’t let these SEO tricks tank your rankings!
