3 SEO Techniques You Are Using That Are Probably Hurting More Than Helping

So…not sure if you got the memo but Google, yeah, they changed things a bit. Okay, not a bit, a lot. The problem is that the web is still jam-packed with SEO tutorials dating back to 2004, 2005, and 2006 when the world worked a bit differently. The main difference was the lack of negative SEO.

SEO

Negative SEO means things that you can do (or someone else can do to you) to hurt your rankings. Google killed negative SEO for a while, but it’s back with a vengeance now which means that your competitors can hurt your rankings…but chances are you’ll hurt it yourself if you do one of these three things:

  1. Getting backlinks from high “PR” directories – sorry folks, the early 2000’s called and they want their super old-school SEO techniques back. Honestly, stop paying for backlinks on PR5 and PR6 directories. Any SEO guide you read that tells you this will help you was probably written before 2012. Now, most of those “high authority” directories you read about could get you de-listed from the big “G” in no time…yes, they learned that trick.
  2. .EDU Backlinks – yup, Google knows about these too. Anyone selling you a backlink for $500 on a .EDU site is selling you a $500 ticket to page 20 on Google, no where you want to be. Right?
  3. Keyword repetition – sure you can still repeat a keyword a few times but going overboard, making the keyword constantly bold, or having a bunch of backlinks to your site using that keyword will do more harm than good. Be very cautious about using and techniques in an SEO book or guide that tells you to repeat your keyword in every sentence or every two sentences, this heavy peppering of keywords has been majorly outed by Google, they know what you’re trying to do and no, it’s not going to help you.

Photo Credit: SEOPlanter via Compfight cc

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton