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Which SEO Techniques Should be Avoided?

  • Buying links from fiverr
  • Building a high ratio of rich anchor text
  • Creating articles for different keyword variations
  • Having the H1 title different to meta title
  • Content spinning
  • Using AI generated content
  • Comment link building
  • Social bookmarking backlinks

For a more detailed guide, keep reading.

So you may think this is obvious but I have to get this one out of the way…

DON’T BUY LINKS FROM FIVERR!

You will see so many SEO packages offering 1st position rankings guaranteed, they’re lying, no one can guarantee you any rankings whatsoever. So do yourself a favour and avoid Fiverr like the plague for your SEO.

I remember when I first got into SEO, the course was so bad but I had no idea because I was completely new to this. The instructor told me to go to Fiverr and purchase backlinks, do you know what happened?

My site didn’t go anywhere. It was dead in the water. 

Building a high ratio of rich anchor text

When you score a guest posting opportunity and you’re inserting your link, don’t make it an exact match keyword link/keyword rich anchor text. 

Keyword rich anchor text is how you over optimise and it hinders your rankings, it could even get you penalised by Google.

So make sure you’re mixing up your anchor text with branded, generic and partial match anchors.

HOWEVER…

You can get away with aggressive internal linking. Internal links that have a rich anchor text won’t be penalised. But you never know, so make sure you leave a buffer where 20% of your internal links are not anchor text rich.

Creating articles for different keyword variations

Previously if you wanted to rank for something like “how to clean a worktop” and “How to remove worktop stain”, you’d have to create 2 separate posts. Even though the intent of those keywords are the same, they’d require 2 separate posts if you wanted to rank higher.

Thanks to Google’s RankBrain update, we longer have to do something like that. Google can now understand synonyms a lot better.

You see, 500 million searches per day Google has never seen before, that’s a lot! So what if the Google search results aren’t able to provide satisfactory websites? That means the user has to look elsewhere which isn’t Google.

And if users start getting used to different search engines, Google’s search engine market share decreases and advertisers are going elsewhere to promote their business. 

Google has been able to understand keywords related to others keywords and topics. They’ve gotten much better at detecting search terms that have the same intent behind them. 

So when you create content, focus on the intent behind that search term. And when you’re doing keyword research, ask yourself, “Have I already created content that goes over this search query’s intent?”

Having the H1 title different to meta title

In 2021, Google rolled out an update where they would be rewriting your meta titles. This caused a major alarm in the SEO industry as the meta title is a major ranking factor so you have to get it right by having your keyword in there.

I found that some of my meta titles were rewritten, you can mitigate this by making sure your H1 title and meta title are the exact same. I know that you can’t always have the H1 and meta title the same so you should test out the meta titles to see if they’ve changed.

If the meta title has changed, then see if you can remove the phrase that’s in your meta title from within the content. For example…

If your target keyword is “are protein shakes worth it?” and you include that within your meta title. But Google displays the meta title as “The truth about protein shakes revealed”, delete this phrase if it’s within your content.

Try to keep the H1 and meta title the same.

Content spinning

Content spinning, ah I remember those days. Bad times… bad times. If you understood how to spin content you could get away with it without Google punishing you for it. I remember spinning content and some of the content was so good I was able to publish it on high authority, high traffic sites.

It even passed the manual test, that’s how good it was.

But those days are gone, content spinning is a thing of the past. If you’re doing it now, it’s just a waste of time, you can be doing so much more.

Here’s the video that got me into spinning. I’ve listed it because I thought you might find it interesting to see how you could spin an article and not get penalised by Google for it.

This technique does not work now:

Using AI generated content

AI generated content has become big in recent years, with popular SEO tools creating their own AI content generated addons. 

At best AI generated content is meh. It’s nothing like the hype has made it out to be and it does not produce great results.

The way AI generates content is by scraping the web. Now, this does not mean the content has been plagiarised because the AI will reword it and if you run it through copyscape, a lot of the time it will show the content is unique.

And yes you can use that content on your website. But this content is just generic, at best it’s content that you would use when you need content to put your backlinks in and that’s pushing it.

Let’s say you’re creating content for a keyword that there’s no to very little content on the web for. How’s the AI going to create content for it? It can’t and that’s its biggest issue. It can’t create original content.

Please see past the hype and know that AI has a long way to go before it can even slightly compete with an experienced writer.

I remember when SEO gurus were teaching people to build links in comment sections of websites. Unfortunately, it didn’t even work back then and it’s definitely not going to work today.

Contextual links (links within the content) have the biggest impact by far. So don’t waste your time with commenting on blogs in hopes for a backlink. Unfortunately, there are still YouTube videos that teach this nonsense, please know that these people are creating YouTube videos for ad revenue, they’re not serious about teaching you actual SEO.

Social bookmarking is another backlinking strategy that needs to be evaded. Just don’t do it. It’s very easy to build social bookmarking backlinks but it’s not effective and hasn’t been for years.

Unfortunately, some people are still doing it when they could get a better return on their time doing something else.

Simply put, social bookmarking is using a browser tool to tag and save a page for you to visit later. 

Remember, contextual backlinks are by far the most powerful and that’s what you should focus on.