Some SEO tricks used to work wonders earlier but may now have a negative impact on your search engine rankings. This article explains why you should shed the old methods of SEO and get up to speed with what search engines want.
Search Engines worked differently a few years back. They were less intelligent, more susceptible to manipulation and could be easily fooled. Today they are not the same. Search Engines factor in over 2000 variables when giving your page or website a rank. There are simply some SEO tricks that used to work wonders earlier but can be bad for your present day rankings. This article explains why you should shed the old methods of SEO and get up to speed with what search engines want.
Keyword Stuffing
As the name suggests, Keyword Stuffing is when a web page is stuffed with various relevent or irrelevant or even unrelated key words, in an attempt to attract the attention of a Search Engine or to mislead the search engine into ranking that web page or website for those keywords. Google's Support Blog stats that:
"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking.
When you punch in a phone number in Googe, you may have noticed websites which don't contain the phone number information, but instead contain the endless list of phone numbers, just so that they come up in Google Search when anyone types in any of those phone numbers. You may also have noticed several articles on the internet, which have an overwhelmingly large number of repetitions of words or phrases, to come up in the Search Engines Rankings.
Link Exchanges
Google's Page Rank or Page Quality indicator, is based largely on the number of quality inbound links from high quality websites. Link Exchanges are the buying or selling of links from one website to another, especially when there is no real interest or relevance in both the linked pages, except the fact that money was paid or a barter was done to get the links up. Pages with high ranks often take money to list links of various other businesses, so that the Page Rank passes on to the other pages. Search Engine's penalize this behavior do not consider the number of inbound links in isolation. They check for quality, quantity and even relevance of the website and internal pages, before they allow the page rank to pass on to other pages.
Mass Directory Submissions
Another way of getting inbound links was to mass submit your website to various website directories. These directories classified your website into various categories and allowed your website to be listed in it. People paid several hundreds of dollars to purchase automated software for submitting your website to these directories. Due to the submissions being free and due to no quality control measures, the value addition of these directories got diluted. Search Engine's stopped respecting these directories and gave them the boot. Numerous such directory services shut down. There are still a couple of directory services, which exist and have maintained their reputation. The Yahoo Directory charges and annual fee for listing and they have strict guidelines. DMOZ is another directory which is heavily moderated and has earned reputation. However, the DMOZ directory is also losing Goodwill due to lack of updates and weeding out old or invalid links.
Low Quality Content
Pages which were mass produced and dumped with information were very popular a few years back. The aim was to get quantity and not quality content out to the user. This meant that the search engine user would be dumped with irrelevant or bad quality information, which would be wasteful. Search Engines have started cracking down on such pages and also on pages which are simply copy pasted from other sources. This however, does not deter people from generating mass content and manufacturing web pages which have duplicate or low value information. It simply is a waste of resources and does not have any effect in improving the search rankings.
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