Are You Doing Bad SEO? Avoid These Outdated SEO Strategies!

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: The transcript discusses outdated or bad SEO tactics and whether they still work or not. The main points are: - AI content can work short-term but often gets penalized long-term. It needs heavy editing and fact checking. - Keyword stuffing doesn't work anymore but using tools like Surfer SEO to naturally incorporate keywords is still effective. - Exact match domains can still work well for local SEO but not as well for competitive affiliate keywords. - Personalized outreach is better than spammy link building, but some automated tools can help personalize at scale. - Prioritize page authority, relevancy and indexing over just domain authority for link building. - Stop comment spam, but high quality, manually approved blog comments can still provide value. - Focus on topics and intent rather than just keyword density. Write to fully cover the topic. - Optimize existing content before just creating new content. Updating old content can boost rankings. - Balance targeting high search volume keywords with those that convert better. - Repurpose/distribute content in multiple formats rather than just social sharing a link. The key point is that many outdated tactics should be avoided, but some still work if done properly. The focus should be on high quality, relevant content that satisfies user intent.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, today we're going to be talking about bad SEO or outdated SEO tactics that'll get your traffic draft looking something like this. However, as you know, it depends is a real answer in SEO, and things are rarely just black and white. A lot of things that some people consider bad SEO or outdated SEO actually work quite well in the short term or even in the long term. Today we're going to be diving into the truth of which of these tactics are actually bad, based on my experience running a seven figure link building agency and ranking hundreds of sites over the years. All right, let's get into it. So I'm Chris Jejus. You might know me from my link building agency over at Swellingsalot Co. Or our other YouTube channel or Facebook group. Or you might have seen me around at some SEO conferences or on some other podcasts, but you can go to my website for more information on me. First of all, we're going to be going over this post by Nick Malekos over on LinkedIn. So let's see if we agree with his ten outdated SEO tactics. Number one, he says don't use AI articles. And he says you should be using editorially checked articles. Don't auto publish hundreds of AI articles without doing heavy editing and fact checking. So with this one, I'm going to go ahead and have to completely agree. Whenever I'm using AI content, I always use my AI editing checklist here, making sure I'm fact checking, adding in additional eat and information gain. If you want access to this checklist, go ahead and subscribe to my channel. I'll be giving it away in the next month or so and give the video a like as well if you're enjoying the content. It's also worth noting that AI articles can work very well in the short term. Lately you'll see a lot of people posting graphs like this where they are shooting up and actually getting significant traffic. However, what you don't usually see is that after a core update or two, if once the site actually gets a good amount of traffic, it ends up looking something like this. From my understanding, what's going on is Google will allow the site to rank. It's like it hasn't really applied its quality checks yet to it until the site actually starts getting a good amount of traffic. And then after that it tests the site a little further and if it seems to fail the checks, then it will go ahead and slap it down. So I would beware of people that are showing you graphs like this that show you increasing rankings in the short term and not something that's lasted for at least a year or so and survived a couple core updates. And especially if your site is monetized with affiliate links and ads, it seems to be scrutinized a little bit heavier. You might be able to get away with stuff a little bit more on like EcoM or rank and rent or other types of sites like that. But if you have any examples of websites that are ranking off of copy and paste AI content, go ahead and drop them in the comments because I would love to take a look. Next up, he says don't do keyword stuffing. Do do semantics and variations. Stop adding keywords to achieve a ratio as software has suggested. Add relevant keywords, add variations, similar words, connected concepts naturally in the text. This one I'm going to have to agree and disagree because it seems like his definition of keyword stuffing is just using something like Surfer SEO. I think Surfer SEO and things like Neuron are great for helping you get in a suggested number of keywords and related keywords into your article, other entities and keywords that other articles that are already ranking are talking about. However, you can kind of use these tools irresponsibly and do things in a bad way, which is you are just kind of jamming all the keywords in there and not really talking about the subjects appropriately. So definitely don't do that. But yeah, as far as old school keyword stuffing where you're really trying to jam the keywords in there many times to try to game the system, definitely do that. But I would say that, you know, surfer, neuron, all this kind of stuff works pretty well. Next up, he says don't use exact match domains, use brandable, memorable domains. It's not about exact matches, but building a brand that connects with audience don't just create websites, build brands that last. I have to go ahead and disagree with this one as well, especially in local niches, you will see a ton of exact match domains working quite well. Number one, Miami SEO company Miami SEM.com, comma the Miami SEO company seomiamy.com and you'll see the same kind of thing when you do any kind of local search. Really. There are tons of exact match and partial match domains out there that are ranking quite well. What I wouldn't want to do is build an exact match domain for something that's like an affiliate keyword, for example, like best VPN. Let's go ahead and scroll down page one here for best VPN. Tom's guide, CNET, Techradar Apple PC Mag, Black Hat, World Tech Republic, XDA forums, Google Play. I know a lot of people used to use exact match domains for these types of keywords and to me it seems like they don't really work well at all. Maybe about five years ago they were quite common and on the first page of the website they would actually have an article instead of some kind of like hub page, what a normally a homepage would be like. But you're going to have to really disagree on this one. I think for a lot of situations, having exact match domains can be insanely powerful. Yeah, you might want to kind of read the room a little bit and see what other people are doing and what's ranking well in that niche. Next step number four, spammy link outreach. What you should do is personalize and networking. Build connections, network with your peers and personalize your outreach, whether it's by email or LinkedIn. Give value first for your audience instead of pitching a list of domains. So I will agree and disagree here because, you know, you can actually get some very good links by doing what he's saying. You know, building connections, actually doing networking in your industry, having highly personalized outreach messages instead of just the same message over and over and over again, that has no personalization at all. A lot of the times when you do outreach like this, you'll end up getting kind of lower tier sites that don't really care as much. However, it really doesn't take much to personalize your outreach messages. Should go ahead and watch this video on my channel right here. Link building with AI. It's not spammy AI link building, it's how to actually use AI in a link building process to improve your link building and just speed things up a bit. So it's really kind of the best of both worlds, right? But you are just using AI to very quickly personalize your messages instead of just pure spam like a lot of people are sending. Next up, he says, do not prioritize DA or doctor. You should prioritize traffic, relevancy and indexing. High Da DA articles with no traffic or writing in 2015 won't pass any link juice to your site. Check articles that rank for relevant keywords are well written and your page will fit naturally. I'll go ahead and agree with this one for the most part. I talk about this a lot in this video right here, how to increase your HDR fast and how doctor is very easy to manipulate and what kind of things you should be looking at instead of doctor. Then I believe I might talk about it on this video as well. We also have to remember that traffic is easy to manipulate. And then there are four different levels of relevancy, right? You have domain level relevancy, article level relevancy, paragraph level relevancy and sentence level relevancy. And all can be natural in SEO, but you want a good balance, right? So you don't want a backlink profile that only has domains that are not relevant. You do want to make sure you get some relevant domains in there as well, but you don't always need domain level relevance. Usually if the domain is in a kind of shoulder niche and then the article is relevant, you will be good to go. Indexing, of course is just a basic thing that you always should be checking. All you have to do is do a site colon and pop one of their articles in or the website in general. And if you get a, you know, guest post or a link on a website and it's not indexing, it's probably not a great choice to build links on. As far as traffic goes, make sure they are ranking for keywords in your niche and actually not just spamming their traffic metrics, doing stuff like branded terms or even fake terms that they've kind of game the system and are saying that have a search volume that actually don't have a search volume or keywords that are just kind of junk keywords that are very low keyword difficulty with very high search volumes that can pump that number up as well. You can check this stuff pretty quickly by just going over to organic keywords and ahrefs and having a quick look of what they are ranking for. You could usually tell within a couple seconds. Usually the top few keywords will just be where they're getting all of their traffic from if it's kind of a toxic farm situation. So for example, here we have this website that is a website about dogs starting to rank pretty well, has a low doctor. And when you come on over to organic keywords, they are ranking for a lot of dog related terms. However, they are all very low difficulty and you'd want to look into things a little bit further than this. Like I know, for example, I'm pretty sure this website, it's a website that I looked up in the past and when you go it's actually just a bunch of AI spam. So you might not want to link on this website, but anyway, you saw a bunch of stuff in here that was non relevant or they're just ranking for their brand name dog nerdly or a bunch of weird stuff that you don't really understand what it is and you know, should be keywords about dogs then probably not a good idea. Number six, he says comment spam. Just stop. Yes, it's still alive and annoying. Please just stop doing it. There is no alternative. I don't even know why it still exists. I'm pretty sure he is talking about blog comment spam here. And yeah, I would definitely agree. Do not do blog comment spam. If you go over to fiverr or legit or whatever and search for blog comments, I pretty much tested a bunch of these services and all of them end up being junk. They end up being blog comments on spammed out pages that anyone can put a blog comment on with thousands and thousands of comments linking to every type of website imaginable. Definitely do not do this kind of blog comment spam. However, you can come over to Google and search for something like blog comment footprints which will look something like this. And you can try to find websites that actually allow blog comments. And then like I mentioned in this video over here, we can use AI to make a statement saying something about the article that you notice and then asking an actual question about the article. And if you do this and if they actually have an approval process and don't just allow anyone to comment on their blog, and you're not trying to just spam exact match anchors and you're not trying to get your keyword in your name. You know, that's what a lot of people do to try to get keyword anchors. If you don't do any of this stuff and you try to do it naturally, then you can actually get good decent links doing blog commenting. However, it's hard to say that doing blog commenting like this is actually a worthwhile thing to do because they're not very powerful links there. Most of the time they're going to be no follow. They can be good for kind of foundational link building. However, a lot of the times to get some actually good blog comments that are on spam blogs, it takes a good amount of time, might not really be worth it, but if you actually do them correctly, blog comments are some of my favorite foundational links. It's just really hard to justify it at this point with how much time they take. Next step, one keyword per page topic. First, your pages do not rank for one keyword each. They rank for multiple keywords from dozens to thousands. Consider writing articles that cover the whole topic. Of course I agree with this. If you're using a tool like surfer SEO, they will help you understand what kind of keywords your article should be ranking for. Or you could just pull up the page and ahrefs. So for example, we could go to this website and see one of their top pages here. So you can see the article for dog side eye. They are ranking for a bunch of different keywords here. Dog side eye, dog giving side eye. Why do dogs give side eye? So you can just pop a page in the ahrefs that's already ranking for the main keyword and see a bunch of the other keywords that it should be ranking for as well. However, I made this video pretty recently as well. Eleven shocking SEO tactics that work and one of the tactics I share in there is that if you have these mega articles that are like, you know, thousands and thousands of words, a lot of the time you can make an individual article for one of the keywords who try to snipe it and you can actually outrank the people that have these big general articles because your page is just more relevant to that keyword. So definitely watch this video for more information on that. So while I'll agree manually on this one, you can also snipe keywords doing this other method that I'm talking about. So yeah, half agree. Next up, meta tags. Don't waste your time. Some people keep adding meta tags as if they were going to help with keywords. Meta tags do not offer anything for SEO. It's a good way to sort pages keywords internally for other purposes, but probably a waste of time. I think he's talking about meta keywords or maybe just tags like WordPress tags definitely don't do either of those things. It's just a waste of time. You don't need to do them, it's not going to help you. But then actually things like your meta description and your title tag are considered meta tags as well. And of course we know those things are super important, but I'm pretty sure he's not talking about that. Number nine, changing publish date automatically update the content first, there are plugins to change the date automatically to show the content as fresh. The proper way to do a date change is having a published date that is constant and changing the updated date after a serious editing. So yes, we know that Google loves fresh content. This video right here, I talked about how I got a 35% gain in one month just by going in and updating some articles. I didn't actually even change the edit edited dates because on this website we don't even have edited or post dates. So I can't really recommend changing the published dates automatically. However, I can't really also say that it doesn't work. It's just not something I do because it's pretty easy to edit the article and then change it from there. Also, keep in mind, like we found out in the Google leak, Google does keep track of major content edits versus kind of these smaller edits. But if I'm being real, I have seen very significant ranking increases just doing from minor edits. So if you're just changing the dates, I don't think I can really recommend that at all. However, I think it's pretty okay just to do slight edits and then to change it. Go in, change some sentences, maybe add some new sections in. It doesn't really take much time and then change the date ten word count SEO and you should be satisfying the intent I often add expected word count to the articles to calculate the effort of the work, but never focus on it. The real measurement should be did I cover the topic completely and satisfactory for the query intent? Whether it's 200 words or 6000, it's about satisfying the user search again. What I like to do is use a tool like surfer and just go in and see what the top rankers are doing, how many words that they have, and get an average somewhere in there. It doesn't really matter if you don't have surf here, you could just go and open up the articles themselves, then use a plugin like detail to quickly see the amount of words. This one has 11,200 words. The number three ranking article here has 12,000 words, and the number four article here has 9000 words. So for this one, I'd probably want to write 9000 or more just because the top three or four rankers have about that amount. So agree and disagree. If all the top rankers had 6000 words and my article had 200 words, I would not be posting that. I'd still try to be in the general ballpark that other people are doing that are already ranking for the keyword. I know at the Google leak, there are a bunch of people talking about how shorter content can rank quite well. However, in my experience, I still try to get these ballpark numbers. I haven't seen shorter content outranking just because it gets them the answer quicker. Yeah, that's just what I'm seeing. If you're seeing something different, go ahead and leave it down in the comments below. I would like to see what you think about it. Next up, we have this post by Jake Ward. Old versus new SEO old SEO. I'll only use keyword tools to find data and opportunities. New SEO. I'll talk to my customers and create content around their pain points. I think creating content around your customers pain points is a very good way to create content because you can get things that maybe aren't in the keyword tools quite yet. But I still use the keyword tools quite a bit. So I think really doing a mix of the two is completely necessary because if you're only doing content around what your customers pain points are and you don't use any kind of keyword tools or looking at your competitors, you're leaving kind of a lot on the table there. But by understanding customers pain points, you probably will uncover a good amount of these, but you'd have to talk to quite a bit of customers. Right, next up, old SEO. Prioritize my keyword list by the highest search volume new SEO. Prioritize my topic ideas by the highest conversion potential. Yeah, I feel like this isn't really new SEO. This is something that you should have been doing for a pretty long time now. So for example, for our link building agency, of course, the keyword buy link insertions is a very buyer intent keyword for us. It's an important keyword that we actually want to rank for and will lead to sales very quickly. However, something like what? Our link insertions is going to have a much higher search volume. Let's try what are niche edits. There we go. Volume of 70. So this keyword is going to have a much higher search volume, except these people are not really looking to buy at this time. This is an informational keyword. You'll see a lot of people, including this dog website that we were looking at, they pretty much try to rank for only low competition informational keywords. But because they're probably trying to monetize either their blog with ads or maybe they're just a guest post farm. However, if you're actually trying to make money on the website, you need to make sure you target that bottom of the funnel stuff and then you can work your way up and do your middle of the funnel and then your top of the funnel, which is kind of your informational keywords. I also agree here because I'll see a lot of people neglect their buyer intent keywords so that they can do informational keywords first just because they know what they can rank for them. But I actually disagree with this approach and I agree with what Jake is saying here. I think that you should do your buyer intent keywords first. This is the basis of your website, there's going to be less of them. And then after that you can go and focus on these lower competition things and try to funnel them all to your money pages. Next up, old SEO. I'll use metrics like keyword difficulty to make decisions. New SEO. I'll spend time finding gaps in the serpent competitors content, considering topical and domain authority of competitors, understanding the search intent. Then I'll make a decision. Yeah, I just don't like keyword difficulty at all. Really. The problem with keyword difficulty is that it often is not a very good metric at all. So let's go and check out this keyword here. Dog side eye. So this isn't actually the greatest example because this website that we're looking at only has a doctor of four and they are ranking for this keyword. However, you can see every other doctor on this page has like a very high doctor, you know, doctor nine. 5858-191-9674 so in most cases, I would say the chances of this website ranking in here are pretty much zero. So Ahrefs has its low keyword difficulty just because these pages don't have many backlinks going to them and they ignore the doctor of the websites, which is extremely important when you're trying to gauge the competition of a serp. Next up, old SEO. I'll just post lots of brand new content. New SEO all regularly optimize and improve existing content. Completely agree with this one. If you have a website, you got a bunch of content on it. Your first priority should be keeping that content up to date. You can conduct regular audits of the content to see how it's performing. If the traffic for that article is going up or down. If it's going down, it might be time for an update or a re optimization. It's always better to optimize this existing content first because Google already knows about it. It's already there. It's already established some kind of trust with Google and getting results from updating this content can be much, much, much quicker than trying to write a bunch of new content. Again, I talk about that in this video here. Next up, old SEO. SEO takes time while only publishing one article a week. New SEO. I'll work in SEO sprints of high output to see results much faster. Yeah, so SEO really only takes time if your budget doesn't allow for it, right? If you have a very high budget, then you can really push through SEO quite quickly. But depending on your niche and like how much authority you have to build, things are still going to take time. If you're in a very high competition niche and everyone's got these really high authority websites that you need to outrank. It's going to take considerable time to build this kind of authority. Even if you have an unlimited budget, right. For everyone on page one for the keywords you want to rank for are all like doctors and you think that you're going to get there with even ten or twenty k a month. It's going to take a still significant time to outperform these websites. Next step, I'll stuff keywords into my headings and paragraphs. New SEO I'll focus on making the page load quickly, fulfilling the searches query, providing the best user experience I can. Yeah, so I would say you need to do all of this stuff, but you still do need to have keywords in your headings and your paragraphs, right. And I've actually seen really good gains by going back and putting more keywords related keywords, keyword variations in things like your h two s, h three s and h four. Not keyword stuffing, doing it in a natural way. Then you need to focus on this other stuff as well. Page speed is very met to me. As long as it's not bad, you don't need to worry about it. Number two, fulfilling the searcher's query search intent is probably the most important thing. To make sure you're doing that and providing a good ux is good as well because you don't want users pogo sticking clicking off your website, clicking on another website. As we learned in the Google leaks, they are paying attention to this stuff more than we thought. So yeah, a good idea to make sure users are having a good time on your site. Old SEO I need to do everything to make my yoast dots turn green. New SEO I'll optimize for topics, entities and overall coverage in my content. Okay, so yeah, I've never ever, ever used yoast to try to rank anything on Google. And it looks like he's using something like Neuron right here, which would be a much better thing. Neuron or server SEO which help you optimize for topics and entities and overall coverage. So yeah, if you're watching this and you're trying to get your yoast green or rank math or whatever, just don't do it. Guys, it's time to get a better tool. This one is talking about content length. Again, you can see for this serp that he pulled up, there is more variation here we got 30 00 70 00 60 00 30 00 so what I would do is, you know, try to write an article that has over 3000 words for this one, whatever the low bar is. However, you also need to go in and make sure that these articles are the same types of articles because a lot of the time Google will show different search intents for the same keyword. So this one cryptocurrency explained with pros and cons for investment. This one, what is cryptocurrency and how does it work? Cryptocurrency explained a guide for beginners. How does cryptocurrency work? A beginner's guide these all look fairly similar to me, but you definitely would go in and check a little bit further and yeah, I'd probably try to write over 3000 for this one. I definitely wouldn't be trying to write over 7400 just to beat this one, which has the highest word count. Next up. And I really like this one and this one. I'm actually going to start doing some other stuff on. I'll make a video on this later in the week, so definitely give this video a like. If you're enjoying the content and subscribe to the channel so you'll see this new video when I post it soon. Basically, old SEO says, I'll publish an article and share the link on our social profile. So you're basically just writing the article and then going on the Facebook and saying, here's my article, new SEO. I'll write my article with distribution in mind. Then I'll turn it into a newsletter, turn it into an x thread, turn it into a LinkedIn carousel, write ten exposed from the article, write five LinkedIn posts from it, repurpose this every three months. So this is very good advice here. You know, you're actually, you can use AI to speed this up a lot. And this is what I'm gonna be talking about in the new video that I'm making. But you're not just going onto social media and saying a line or two and then dropping your link, you're actually creating valuable content from it. And then you can drop a link like in your comment on the post or on the second part of the post if you're on Twitter. But anyway, this is really good stuff here and I'll show you guys this in the new video I'm making. Next up, old SEO I'll build as many backlinks as possible via guest blogging, directory submissions and link exchanges. New SEO I'll prioritize digital pr to earn high quality, authoritative backlinks. I kind of disagree with this one. Digital PR can get you some very good links, but there are other kinds of backlinks that provide very good ranking results as well. But if you're just talking about guest blogging directory submissions, these are pretty much write for us blogs. Blogs that anyone can go and just post a guest post on immediately. A lot of times it's free or very, very cheap, then don't do that. And link exchanges definitely wouldn't be doing too many of the reciprocal link exchanges. But you can still do link exchanges if you keep it to a minimum and do it only with good websites. And especially you can do a little bit more if you're doing ABC link exchanges. However, kind of beware here, there are a lot of bunch of crappy websites doing link exchanges. So anyway, if you're just talking about these two things, then I definitely wouldn't be doing too much of that. And you can do digital prince. However, I really wouldn't sleep on things like good guest posts, good link insertions, things like Haroehdeh, all your foundational link building. You know, there's a bunch of other good backlinks out there. Alright guys, that's it for today. What do you think about this list of outdated or bad SEO? Do you agree or disagree? Let me know down in the comments some of the bad or outdated SEO tactics that you think should be added to this list. Or maybe I got something completely wrong based on your experience. Go ahead and let me know in the comments if you liked the video. Like comment and subscribe and I will see you next time. Okay, bye.