It has been a no-brainer that if a business—whether established or not—wants to create exposure for their brand or at least spread awareness about their relevance; search engine optimization (SEO for brevity) should be a paramount consideration.
After all, there has never been a time before now wherein traditional marketing strategies such as flairs, ads and the like are rendered outdated and superseded by contemporary means. After all, with most individuals connected online on a perpetual basis and if you are a sharp marketer who possesses good business acumen, you would do well to exploit this phenomenon of online marketing. One of the few avenues where you can take advantage of the online marketing phenomena is to leverage your search rankings by optimizing your websites (and thus, SEO).
Unfortunately, it is not enough that you do and use SEO in promoting your websites and its respective contents. You have to ensure that the techniques you are using are still valid and more importantly, would not get you penalized. Take note: Google makes routine algorithm updates, so it is best if you aligned your SEO practices with them. Whether you are practicing SEO in the Philippines or elsewhere, having an awareness of what these obsolete tactics are can greatly help you refine your marketing and SEO strategy.
Here are some of the SEO practices, techniques and tactics that are obsolete and no longer valid in 2024:
1. Link Exchanges
Although this has been somewhat considered a legitimate back in the day, Google might consider this to be a black hat strategy for SEO. Furthermore, it has been obsolete for years now. Pretty much as the name suggests, link exchanging means you and another website owner would come to an agreement wherein you request links from each other. When it works out, you continue exchanging links with other webmasters to improve your ratings. Unfortunately, this technique can be penalized by Google and even worse, it is easily detected.
2. Submitting to search engines manually
It has been a given that you should regularly update your website and submit these updates to the search engines manually. After all, Google is not the only existing search engine there is and if you want your chances of brand exposure to improve, you should optimize your website for every search engine and not just Google. However, those days are long gone and web crawlers are now capable of discovering your website without needing the prompt. While you can still let them know about your website, you would have to do it through Google’s search console.
3. Spam Blog Commenting
Considered as a bad SEO practice, spam blog commenting has been the practice of many SEO experts in order to get the news of their website out there. More often than not, the technique involves commenting on various blogs and forums. Your comment may contain a small blurb alongside your website’s URL. At times, they may elect to use automated scripts which would automatically post to a variety of online blogs. Unfortunately, the comments offer nothing constructive to the blog. The practice is nothing more than a spam technique utilized in gathering backlinks. While there is nothing wrong in commenting on a blog, if you are doing it with the ulterior motive of getting backlinks, refrain from doing it. Not only are you considered a nuisance in the comments section, but you might be blocked from commenting on the website ever again.
4. Having a different web age for every keyword
It seemed to be a practice back in the day wherein webmasters would dedicate an entire webpage for every keyword they have. In fact, the content of the entire page would be reserved only for a particular keyword. While considered obsolete, this technique is still essential as it is still necessary to have a keyword focus. However, you should see to it that they are appropriately placed on the page
5. Link Farm
Ranking on the first page of Google is a primary goal of many business proprietors. However, link farming should be a technique that should be avoided. The technique basically involves the usage of a wide variety of free web content hosting sites such as Blogger and WordPress where thin content articles are presented just to link back to the primary website. This black hat technique was not only done regularly, but it was also a black hat technique that was abused. Avoid this technique at all costs if you do not wish to have your websites penalized.
