Some SEO practices haven’t kept pace with changes in search engines and may now be self-defeating, leading to content that fails to rank. Here are six SEO practices that hinder ranking and suggestions for more effective approaches.
1. Redundant SEO Practices
The word redundant means no longer effective, not necessary, superfluous. The following are three redundant SEO practices.
A. Expired Domains
For example, some SEOs think that buying expired domains is a relatively new thing but it’s actually well over twenty years old. Old school SEOs stopped buying them in 2003 when Google figured out how to reset the PageRank on expired domains. Everyone holding expired domains at that time experienced it when they stopped working.
This is the announcement in 2003 about Google’s handling of expired domains:
“Hey, the index is going to be coming out real soon, so I wanted to give people some idea of what to expect for this index. Of course it’s bigger and deeper (yay!), but we’ve also put more of a focus on algorithmic improvements for spam issues. One resulting improvement with this index is better handling of expired domains–the authority for a domain will be reset when a domain expires, even though dangling links to the expired domain are still out on the web. We’ll be rolling this change in over the next few months starting with this index.”
In 2005 Google became domain name registrar #895 in order to gain access to domain name registration information in order to “increase the quality” of the search results. Becoming a domain name registrar gave them real-time access to when domain names were registered, who registered them and what web hosting address they were pointing to.
It’s surprising to relatively newbie SEOs when I say that Google has a handle on expired domains but it’s not news to those of us who were the very first SEOs in history to buy them. Buying expired domains for ranking purposes is an example of a redundant SEO practice.
B. Google And Paid Links
Another example are paid links. I know for a fact that some paid links will push a site to rank better and this has been the case for many years and still is. But, those rankings are temporary. Most sites generally don’t get a manual action, they just stop ranking.
A likely reason is that Google’s infrastructure and algorithms can neutralize the PageRank flowing from paid links thereby allowing the site to rank where it’s supposed to rank without disrupting their business by penalizing their site. That wasn’t always the case.
The recent HCU updates are a blood bath. But the 2012 Google Penguin algorithm update was cataclysmic on a scale several orders larger than what many are experiencing today. It affected big brand sites, affiliate sites and everything in between. Thousands and thousands of websites lost their rankings, nobody was spared.
The paid link business never returned to the mainstream status it formerly enjoyed when so-called white hats endorsed paid links based on the rationalization that paid links weren’t bad because they’re “advertising.” Wishful thinking.
Insiders at the paid link sellers informed me that a significant amount of paid links didn’t work because Google was able to unravel the link networks. As early as 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to identify unnatural link patterns. In 2006 Google applied for a patent on a process that used a Reduced Link Graph as a way to map out the link relationships of websites, which included identifying link spam networks.
If you understand the risk, have at it. Most people who aren’t interested in burning a domain and building another one should avoid it. Paid links is another form of redundant SEO.
C. Robots Index, Follow
The epitome of redundant SEO is the use of “follow, index” in the meta robots tag.
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />
This is why index, follow is redundant:
Indexing pages and following links are Googlebot’s default mode. Telling it to do that is redundant, like telling yourself to breathe.
Meta robots tags are directives. Googlebot can’t be forced to index content and follow links.
Google’s Robots Meta documentation only lists nofollow and noindex as valid directives.
“index” and “follow” are ignored because you can’t use a directive to force a search engine to follow or index a page.
Leaving those values there is a bad look in terms of competence.
Validation:
Google’s Special Tags documentation specifically says that those tags aren’t needed because crawling and indexing are the default behavior.
“The default values are index, follow and don’t need to be specified.”
Here’s the part that’s a head scratcher. Some WordPress SEO plugins add the “index, follow” robots meta tag by default. So if you use one of these SEO plugins, it’s not your fault if “index, follow” is on your web page. SEO plugin makers should know better.
2. Scraping Google’s Search Features
I’m not saying to avoid using Google’s search features for research. That’s fine. What this is about is using that data verbatim “because it’s what Google likes.” I’ve audited many sites that were hit by Google’s recent updates that exact match these keywords across their entire website and while that’s not the only thing wrong with the content, I feel that it generates a signal that the site was made for search engines, something that Google warns about.