SEO is an ever-changing world and it is imperative to update and change the tactics followed to get the best results. However, many SEO companies still make use of outdated SEO tactics in hopes that they might still work. Such SEO practices may offer you some results, but adopting obsolete strategies will do you much harm in the long run. Detailed below are some of the outdated SEO tactics that you need to avoid at all costs.
Exact Match Domains
Exact match domains (EMDs) were a much used hot topic once. It was very easy to make a microsite on an EMD to rank much faster than the traditional branded domains. With an exact match domain, your domain will be matching the exact keyword phrase that you are targeting. In the past, they even ranked in a few weeks or a couple of days. However, EMDs totally lost its power when Google adjusted their algorithm and released a few updates. Nowadays, they are much likely to be flagged as spam, either manually or algorithmically.
Link and Article Directories
Link directories have become useless these days. However, niche specific high quality directories, which follow very strict editorial guidelines, are still relevant. Link directories had served as an efficient and effective way to categorize sites long before the search engines were so powerful and effective as they are now.
In those days, link directories exploded in popularity as they helped to satisfy the appetite of digital marketers to have easy and fast links, and the crave of site admins to have additional revenue. However, they do not offer any real value to the users, and so, search engines started to ignore these directories gradually. With the evolution of search engines, the link directories lost their effectiveness and became a wasteland of low quality, useless links that can get your website penalized.
Reciprocal Linking
In the eyes of a search engine, a link to another website is a vote for that particular site, and so, reciprocal linking is like saying, “If you vote for me, I’ll vote for you.” Google and the other search engines see this as a manipulative link practice. However, many SEO companies and digital marketers still follow this practice and trade links blindly. Many of the links are simply dumped on resources or links page, or broken to categorical pages, which do not provide any value to the visitors. You should never follow this tactic though, as Google can now penalize your site for using reciprocal linking.
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