6 SEO Practices You Need To Stop Right Now

6 SEO Practices You Need To Stop Right Now

Scraping Google’s search features like People Also Ask and People Also Search For can be a way to get related topics to write about. But in my opinion it’s probably not a good idea to exact match those keywords across the entire website or in an entire web page.

It feels like keyword spamming and building web pages for search engines, two negative signals that Google says it uses.

3. Questionable Keyword Use

Many SEO strategies begin with keyword research and end with adding keywords to content. That’s an old school way of content planning that ignores the fact that Google is a natural language search engine.

If the content is about the keyword, then yes, put your keywords in there. Use the headings for describing what the content is about and titles to say what the page is about. Because Google is a natural language search engine it should recognize your phrasing as meaning what a reader is asking about. That’s what the BERT is about, understanding what a user means.

The decades old practice of regarding headings and titles as a dumping ground for keywords is deeply ingrained. It’s something I encourage you to take some time to think about because a hard focus on keywords can become an example of SEO that gets in the way of SEO.

4. Copy Your Competitors But Do It Better?

A commonly accepted SEO tactic is to analyze the competitors top-ranked content, then use the insights about that content to create the exact same content but better. On the surface it sounds reasonable but it doesn’t take much thinking to recognize the absurdity of a strategy predicated on copying someone else’s content but “do it better.” And then people ask why Google discovers their content but declines to index it.

Don’t overthink it. Overthinking leads to unnecessary things like the whole author bio EEEAT thing the industry recently cycled through.  Just use your expertise, use your experience, use your knowledge to create content that you know will satisfy readers  satisfied  and make them buy more stuff.

5. Adding More Content Because Google

When a publisher acts on the belief that ‘this is what Google likes,’ they’re almost certainly headed in the wrong direction. One example is a misinterpretation of Google’s Information Gain patent which they think means Google ranks sites that contain more content on related topics than what’s already in the search results.

That’s a poor understanding of the patent but more to the point, doing what’s in a patent is generally naïve because ranking is a multi-system process, focusing on one thing will not generally be enough to get a site to the top.

The context of the Information Gain Patent is about ranking web pages in AI Chatbots. The invention of the patent, what makes it new, is that it’s about anticipating what the next natural language question will be and then having those ready to show in the AI search results or showing those additional results after the original answers.

The key point about that patent is that it’s about anticipating what the next question will be in a series of questions. So if you ask an AI chatbot how to build a bird house, the next question the AI Search can anticipate is what kind of wood to use. That’s what information gain is about. Identifying what the next question may be and then ranking another page that answers that additional question.

The patent is not about ranking web pages in the regular organic search results. That’s a misinterpretation caused by cherry picking sentences out of context.

Publishing content that’s aligned with your knowledge, experience and your understanding of what users need is a best practice. That’s what expertise and experience is all about.

6. Basing Decisions On Research Of Millions Of Google Search Results

One of the longtime bad practices in SEO, going back decades, is the one where some SEO does a study of millions of search results and then draws conclusions about factors in isolation. Drawing  conclusions about links, word counts, structured data, and 3rd party domain rating metrics ignores the fact that there are multiple systems at work to rank web pages, including some systems that completely re-rank the search results.

Here’s why SEO “research studies” should be ignored:

A. Isolating one factor in a “study” of millions of search results ignores the reality that pages are ranked due to many signals and systems working together.

B. Examining millions of search results overlooks the ranking influence of natural language-based analysis by systems like BERT and the influence they have on the interpretation of queries and web documents.

C. Search results studies present their conclusions as if Google still ranks ten blue links. Search features with images, videos, featured snippets, shopping results are generally ignored by these correlation studies, making them more obsolete than at any other time in SEO history.

It’s time the SEO industry considers sticking a fork in search results correlations then snapping the handle off.

SEO Is Subjective

SEO is subjective. Everyone has an opinion. It’s up to you to decide what is reasonable for you.

See also: Black hat tactics are heavily penalized by Google.

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Roman Samborskyi

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