April 10, 2017

Ahh the late 2000s, what a time to be alive. The Fast and The Furious franchise was only on its 4th movie, Gnarls Barkley had a Grammy award winning hit called “Crazy” and an early 20-something Sebastian Agosta was reading books and blogs on SEO tricks that could put his websites at the top of Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. Since then a lot has changed. Google has established its dominance as THE search engine, MSN Search morphed into Bing and partnered with Yahoo and The Rock is shifting the direction of missiles with his bare hands in the latest Fate of the Furious trailer (No really, he is).

Search engine optimization has gone through some significant changes as well. Both Google and Bing provide webmasters with guidelines on how to properly structure and optimize their website for better rankings. Breaking these rules however, can result in your website being de-ranked or banned entirely. Here’s a quick breakdown on the difference between the two:

• De-ranked: The search engine rank position (SERP) of your website goes from 1st or 2nd page to 12th or 13th page.
• Banned: Your website is removed from the search engine entirely. Even searching “site:www.yoursite.com” will yield no search results.

The ironic part is that most the black hat SEO tricks that get you banned today were considered SEO tips in the mid to late 2000s. Let’s take a look.

Hidden Text

Adding hidden text that included your targeted keywords in the header, footer or main content area of your website was very popular in the mid 2000’s. Search engine optimizers realized that search engines loved content laced with keywords and rather than writing thought-provoking unique content like they do today, they just packed their web pages with keywords that blended into the background color of the website.

Participating in Link Schemes

GoDaddy may best be known for its silly and often racy Superbowl commercials but it’s also known as the website that made it incredibly easy to register a domain name. Because GoDaddy made things so easy, digital marketers were purchasing any and all domain names related to their business. They’d then take those domains, create a website with no value to the end user and link those websites to their main business website – creating what is now called a link scheme.

Duplicate Content

In the late 2000s, SEOs who ran multiple websites within the same industry would use the exact same content on each website, subtly changing a word or sentence to make the content appear unique to search engines. SEOs thought they were pretty clever back then and some of them paid for it when Google and Bing caught on. Nowadays duplicating content from another website is not only an offense that can get you banned by search engines but could also end up in a copyright lawsuit.

Keyword Stuffing

Of the 4 SEO tricks I mentioned today, this is the one I still see inexperienced SEOs doing on a regular basis in 2017 even though it should have stopped in 2008. Keyword stuffing is adding your targeted keywords within the content of your website even when it doesn’t make sense grammatically. Your content should be developed for real users and readers, not search engine bots. Keep your keyword density low and only include keywords in content when it fits within the flow of the page.