SEO Tactics That Definitely Won't Help You Grow – Episode 67

I think one of the biggest bits of advice we keep giving on this podcast, to be fair, is, you know, kind of like write good, genuine content.

Yeah, the sad thing is from our point of view...

Actually need to do.

SEO isn't actually rocket science, you know, Google is there to provide a user with the best answer to their questions. So what you've got to do is provide the best answer to a specific question.

By the time you've spent all this time googling all these like weird, crazy SEO hacks and quirks, and then you spend all this time thinking about how to buy the links, you've wasted way more time than if you just sat down and said, right, okay, what do the people I'm trying to sell to care about, what do they want to know? How do I answer that and then write it, publish it? Like, I just think you probably better just spend the time doing that than to mess about with all this stuff.

Yeah. Don't even bother. Your shortcuts probably won't save you much time. They certainly won't save you any money and they might actually harm you.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Digital Marketing From The Coalface. This time it's just me and Julie, and we're going to be talking about what are we going to be talking about?

We're talking about all the SEO, dodgy things that you really, really shouldn't do.

That's right. Yeah. So tactics, the kind of things that I guess in years gone by were pretty commonplace. And that will now get your site penalised or.

Penalised or ignored or will cost you money for no apparent reason or would just make you look really stupid.

Yeah. And yeah, and I guess it's probably quite important to preface this by saying that a lot of these tactics, they're not going to get you kind of, you know, banned from Google or get your website.

It's unlikely some of them might, but you'd have to be really awful to do that. But this is just stuff.

That, you know, if you spend time on it, you spend money on it. It probably won't actually get you anywhere. It's not really worth trying. They're just tactics that we know for a fact are devalued.

Yeah. They used to work in the good old days where the good old Wild West, when everything worked and you could do anything and. But Google's way more clever now, and you just can't get away with it anymore. And yeah, it's not worth it. And it's a waste of money. And it's not going to help because people will see through it. And it makes you look a wee bit sort of shoddy.

Yeah, definitely. Weirdly, though, we do still see quite a lot of people doing it right, which I guess is why we're. Yeah. Why we're recording.

It still happens less, I think, now. But there's things that still happen and there's still confusion, I think. So it's worth just clearing up a few things that if somebody says, we're going to do this, just big red.

Flag, flag.

Don't do.

It one hundred percent. Yeah. So I guess, yeah. Do you want to kick off or.

Yeah, yeah. The first thing is probably the most obvious one, which is keyword stuffing.

Yes.

Um, that's probably the thing that happens. It still happens a bit and you know, is used to be really, really common. It's picking a keyword that maybe something you've found by doing your research. And it's not it's not a phrase that fits very nicely into a sentence like digital marketing. Aberdeen. Yep. And so you would never say, you know, welcome. You know, we are a digital marketing Aberdeen agency. It just doesn't make sense.

So there was a really good example of this weirdly in the news today wasn't it. Yeah. In the Telegraph. So um Rishi Sunak who will not get political. Um but he. Yeah. So he's running to be prime minister. He wrote an article in the Telegraph where he used the word Thatcherite three times in one sentence, four times in two consecutive sentences. Really, it's an achievement. But but that's yeah, that's.

Quite difficult to do.

That's the kind of thing we're talking about. Right? It's like the phrase is unwieldy. It doesn't really fit naturally, but you need or you think you need to get it on the page at least sixty times. So you just jam it into sentences.

Yeah. There used to be a thing, you know, like.

Keyword.

Density, the number of words in keyword density, the number of words in your article, and you had to have a proportion of that, the number of times that the keyword showed up in the article and basically Google does not like that anymore. And actually it's worse. You can have too many, too many times in an article. You can have a keyword too many times, which is worse than probably having it not enough.

I think it's a prime example of where like, the internet's just grown up a bit, isn't it? To start with? If you use the word cycling shoes sixty times in an article, Google would look at it and say, oh, this is an article about cycling shoes. Now they know that you know, words like cycling shoes, cycling trainers, trainers for cycling are all synonymous for all the same. So you don't need to use the kind of unnatural force.

And it actually wants to see the sort of contextual stuff. So if you're selling cycling shoes, it actually wants to see the word.

Like different varying.

Trainers. It wants to see the word bicycle. It wants to see, um, bike helmet. I want to see like other words in the article so that it actually knows the article is about cycling shoes and it's.

Real and valuable and not.

About something completely different and happens to be trying to sort of flog cycling shoes off the back of it, you know? So yeah, you need the whole article needs to make sense.

To a reader.

To a reader who is.

Looking.

For information about cycling shoes. So, um, yeah, that's keyword stuffing. Don't, don't use it too often. Use it so that it makes sense. Use other words that are in context so that Google understands really what you're talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other thing I would say about it, where it's particularly important to be aware of this one, is probably if you're paying people to write articles for your website, right? Especially if you go out and hire a freelancer and you say, I want an article that is about, you know, cycling shoes, right? And they're going to come back to you with a piece of content that has the keyword in there, like twice a paragraph or whatever. If it feels unnatural when you're reading it, it is unnatural. Yeah. Don't publish.

It. Yeah. That's it. Some writers still sort of sort of work on the basis that, you know, they've been trained to, to do it that way. And, you know, sometimes you don't want that. Yeah. It has to read properly. Remember, you're ultimately writing for human beings. You're not writing for Google's machines.

Yeah, absolutely.

So write for humans. Always.

Yeah. Which I guess kind of brings us neatly on to our kind of second point, isn't it, which is duplicate content, which, yeah.

There's a lot of, there's kind of a lot of myths out there about duplicate content.

Yeah. I think this is a really tricky one, right? So duplicate content is exactly what it sounds like, right? It's content that is duplicated across multiple web pages. Often, as is the case with a couple of our clients, people will come along and just kind of copy paste your content and put it on their website. Yeah. Which is very annoying and very cheeky. Um, also sometimes people do it to themselves, right? Because they'll, you know, write something on their blog and then they'll just think, oh, that sounds really good. I'll copy and paste it onto my website.

Yeah. Or you have the thing where it's like, you know, digital marketing agency in Aberdeen, you're like, oh, we want to target Glasgow. We'll just, we'll copy the digital marketing agency Aberdeen page and change the word Aberdeen to Glasgow, and then we'll do it for Birmingham and Manchester and London. And.

You know, suddenly there's a whole lot of duplicate content.

Yeah. If you've just changed a couple of words on it, it is still duplicate content. Um, but Google doesn't penalise anymore does it?

No. And I think that's like you're saying like it's one of the persistent myths, right? People like, oh, if Google catches you with duplicate content on your site, they'll ban you or you'll get like a, you know, a kind of penalty handed down and you'll end up with a manual penalty on your account. And, you know, I think there may have been a time.

I.

Think it probably.

Used to happen or the again.

It certainly doesn't happen. I mean, they don't have the time or the resources. And to be honest, Google's way more sophisticated than that, right? So they can literally just say, oh, actually, we know this is duplicate content. We're going to ignore it.

They ignore all except one in theory. Um, sometimes it takes a wee while, but.

one of the places where it can be problematic is just going back to the, the, the client we have, where they have this kind of persistent issue where every time they publish a web page, somebody will come along and copy and paste it onto their website. And the problem is, occasionally the people who steal your work end up ranking above you because Google, for whatever reason, you know, maybe Google indexes their page first. Maybe Google misses your page a little bit. Whatever. They think that that's the original source and that's frustrating.

Yeah, that is frustrating. You've put the effort in to writing something really good and somebody else likes it. But on the whole.

Yeah, I mean.

It's the first one. Once Google's indexed it once, it's just going to ignore everything else that looks the same.

And that is why it is, I guess, never worth doing. It's never worth stealing somebody else's content because Google will ignore it and you will just irritate everybody, and you just make the web a worse place, really.

If if you have a reason for putting the same thing on multiple pages. So say you have a website information. Yeah. Or yeah, or a website that has a website for Britain. And then you've got a website for America and then a website for Australia. And you know, you're about us. Information is pretty much the same for all of them. There's the canonical, I can't even say it canonical.

Canonical.

Which makes, I don't know even what the word canonical means, but you talk about canonical tags. So explain canonical tags.

Yeah. So I mean, it's exactly what it says. So canonical literally just means the original version. And what you're basically saying to Google is this page is duplicated elsewhere on the web. This URL is the original version of it. And it's kind of like you're basically admitting to Google that you've stolen it so that they don't look at it and think, this person's trying to kind of pull one over.

And on all the copy pages, you can see this isn't the canonical, and you tell it which one is the canonical version of that page.

Yeah. So Google will basically ignore the non-canonical versions. They'll always look.

So you're basically making sure Google picks the right one to, to index.

Yeah. And to be fair, I mean, that's the same with all the, the kind of SEO tags that we use, right? It's all just to inform Google to make sure that it doesn't have to jump through hoops to try and work out what you've done. Um.

Pointing it in the right direction. It's the same as your page titles and everything else. It's pointing Google in the right direction and giving it as much guidance so that it kind of gets what you're on about.

Yeah. And I think that's the thing a lot of people kind of maybe miss about SEO in, in kind of what, where are we twenty twenty two? There we go.

If you're listening to this in twenty twenty two, the, the podcast has lasted very well.

I mean, we're talking here about tactics that used to work really well that don't work very well now. It used to be the case that what we were, what the SEO industry as a whole was kind of trying to do, right, was sort of trick Google or pull one over.

Or basically it was like workarounds. Well, yeah. Cheats the the.

Now.

Google loopholes, shall we say kindly.

Now it's very much about working within their webmaster guidelines, helping Google to find your content, making sure that everything's kind of above board and done well, because ultimately you won't fool them forever. You probably won't even fool them for long nowadays. No, they're.

They're little machines are very clever now.

And.

They've got AI so they can work things out a lot better than, than it sort of was very sort of broad brush before, but it's really quite clever now.

It's like the duplicate content thing where I, you know, I've seen people steal content and it just never ranks. It's not like Google ranks it and then changes its mind. They just know, you know, from the word.

Go it's pointless. It's just a waste of time.

Absolutely. Um, so I guess what's next after duplicate content?

Well, we this is sort of the whole topic of a blog post, which is kind of why we started recording this podcast.

Podcast, podcast host podcast.

Um, it's basically hidden texts. So people use, you don't see it so much now. People used to do things like have a little white bar at the bottom of their website or above a web page and put white text on it with loads and loads of keywords so that it was invisible to users. So you weren't ruining your user experience, but on the basis that Google would see the keywords and somehow like actually not realise that it was just a list of keywords, white on white text on a white background, or yellow text on a yellow background or whatever it was. So hiding keywords so that your users don't see them. And supposedly Google does.

Would think, oh, this text is this page is full of all these keywords. It must be really relevant and really useful and really interesting. And, you know, going back to what we said at the very beginning of this, you know, you can't it's not about stuffing a load of keywords into your pages anymore. Google's much smarter than that. So there's really.

It's one of those things that probably did work for a little while.

Yeah. And I think to be fair, there is a kind of more grown up version. I occasionally see people on like Moses forums, for example, talking about now, which is like, can I put a load of SEO optimised and SEO, how they refer.

To search engine optimised, optimised.

For SEO optimised text in concertinas or dropdowns on my web page so that the user can't see them. And it doesn't make the page too long, but Google sees them. And again, the answer is no, because Google obviously, you know, they're unsurprisingly, they're kind of a bit ahead of you there. And they've already thought of that and they just ignore it. And that is, I think, the same thing with the white text on a white background, right? Google will just completely.

It just ignores it. It's just pointless. So yeah, just instead of waste your time, right? For humans.

Instead of spending all that time making your text white, just write better text and have it on your web page. Yeah, just essentially.

Write, write something helpful and relevant for your target audience. Um, yeah.

There's always something interesting to say. I mean, this is the thing that baffles me about the whole thing, especially where people are like, oh, can I just hide all my text behind a concertina? It's like, if, if you're going to say it, it's because it's useful to people.

So yes, if you, if you need to hide it, then it probably isn't worth having then.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Um, so the next one we'll just touch on briefly because I think we have recorded several podcasts on this subject before, but it's, um, link building.

Uh, buying links. Yeah. Um, this is like everybody's favorite SEO tactic, right? So I guess just very briefly, a link is valuable to your website because every time somebody links to your website, Google thinks, oh, that's a signal of trust. It shows that somebody trusts your website because they referred to it and.

How the internet started, how the World Wide Web started. It was a web of links from one academic piece of content to another. And if somebody links to your stuff, it means that it's good enough for somebody to want to, you know, recommend it. Basically, it's a recommendation.

But yeah, obviously people then think, oh, I know I can just go away and buy six hundred links from various doctors.

Broke it as usual.

Yeah. Um, this to be fair, I think this is probably one of the things you can still be pretty heavily penalised for. It'll be an algorithmic rather than a manual penalty, but I, yeah, I think if you yeah.

There are toxic links and then there are just rubbish links.

Yeah. Google will ignore a lot of the rubbish ones.

If they're toxic you do get penalised and that's the really, really bad ones.

You don't want to be there. Just don't buy links. Don't. That's my advice.

I mean, the whole point is that it's a it's a recommendation on the fact of the quality of your content. So if you're having to pay for it, it's not a recommendation, is it? So yeah, if technically, if you have paid for the link, Google should ignore it. Sometimes, obviously, Google doesn't really know whether you've paid for it or not, so it has to be a. It has to look like a proper recommendation.

There is a bit of a gray area here, I think, as well, because a lot of the.

PR type stuff. Yeah, you can get a, you can get a mention in a magazine and then pay to have your picture added. So technically you're not buying the link.

But yeah.

Um, just, you know, just going to somebody who says, I'll get you seventy five links for twenty quid. No, just don't do it because it's going to be rubbish and they're going to put you on all sorts of dodgy things, either dodgy or just completely irrelevant.

Yeah.

So either way it's not worth it.

I mean, again, it's, it's either gonna not work at all or it's going to get you in hot water. Yeah. And it's just not real. No real point in any of that really. No. Um, spend the money elsewhere on something better.

Yeah, basically. The final one, um, is Basically content that isn't worth ranking. We call it thin content. Yeah. It's um.

I think.

This is explain. Explain thin content.

You're becoming Dave. You'll be like, no, you've done it wrong.

I can't be bothered talking about this. You talk about it.

I think this is probably probably actually the hardest one to explain the biggest grey area. So basically it's just rubbishy.

Waffly. Yeah, like spammy type stuff or just a really short page that doesn't really well, it's all about the purpose of writing content, which is to help people answer questions and, and, um, you know, give people answers. And if it's really doesn't, then.

So my, yeah, my problem with thin content is actually, I think, I think thin implies short implies that it's only gonna be a few lines. Sometimes whatever you're writing about can be answered very, you know, the problem you're discussing or the thing that you want to sell. Somebody can be described very quickly, and you don't actually need masses of content. I mean, you'll see if you ask a very specific question on Google, like, I don't know how many, how many pounds in a stone or something like that.

Yeah, you'll get.

A one sentence answer, right? So it's like there are times when really short content is fine.

Google does know like these little paragraphs that answer your question very succinctly.

Snippets.

I can't speak today succinctly. Um, yeah. And they will give that, that answer, you know, on the search page rather than even sending you to a website.

So yeah. And it's.

Woefully stuff that really isn't very helpful.

If it doesn't have value to a user, if it doesn't answer the query that you're trying to rank for, if it doesn't talk about something that's actually useful and interesting, Google will probably just ignore it. And this goes for, you know, when you're told to like write a product or a service page and you just kind of like bash some stuff down. And it also goes when you're writing blog posts and you just think, oh, I can't really be bothered. I'll just waffle for a bit.

It's just something that's written purely to shove keywords into something. And so it kind of almost goes back to the keyword stuffing as well. It there's an overlap there, I think.

Yeah, I think one of the biggest bits of advice we keep giving on this podcast, to be fair, is, you know, kind of like write good, genuine content. Yeah.

The sad thing is, from our point of.

View, you actually need to.

Do SEO isn't actually rocket science is, you know, Google is there to provide a user with the best answer to their questions. So what you've got to do is provide the best answer to a specific question in a way that is targeted at the people asking that question. And that's it really. You know, it's, it's, it's really very simple. I don't know how we managed to spin this out to millions of podcasts, because that's kind of what kind of what it comes down to, isn't it?

And that's why we'll be out of a job in a month. No, but I mean, yeah, I mean, look, that's the thing, isn't it? I think it's a very human thing to want things to be complicated, to want there to be hacks and secret ways of doing things. And oh, if I just write this blog post, but include slightly different words and arrange the heading in a slightly different way, it will perform better. And that means I don't have to do as much hard work, but unfortunately, it's none of that's.

Humans are hard wired to conserve energy.

Yeah.

Which means that we're hardwired to find shortcuts and quick ways. That's why we invented fire and wheels and computers and everything else. Our, you know, our purpose is to conserve energy. So we look for shortcuts and easy way of doing things. But, um.

Some, some light philosophy for you. Sorry. No.

It's good.

I think it's really good. I mean.

But yeah, that's why people do look for these cheats and not just get on with the hard work of actually doing your research and writing decent stuff and making it look nice. And, you know, it just takes a bit longer and it's a bit harder. So yeah, but actually it is the way to do it. And it's one of these things you actually have to do it properly.

But you see, I'm not really sure that's true because I think by the time. Well, no, I just think that by the time you've spent all this time googling all these like weird, crazy SEO hacks and quirks, and then you spend all this time thinking about how to squeeze the white text onto your website or how to buy the links. You've wasted way more time than if you just sat down and said, right, okay, what do the people I'm trying to sell to care about, what do they want to know? How do I answer that and then write it, publish it? Like, I just think you're probably better to just spend the time doing that than to.

Mess about.

With all this.

Stuff. Yeah. Don't don't even bother. Your shortcuts probably won't save you much time. They certainly won't save you any money and they might actually harm you. Is that a fair summary?

Yeah, I think that's pretty much the nail on the head. Really. Right. Do good things instead. And I guess if you want to know about what those good things are, um, check out the rest of the episodes of the podcast, because that's pretty much all we talk about is kind of good tactics. Um, but yeah, I think that's pretty much everything. Um, I guess if you have any questions, um, or you want to know, you know, what happens if you do any of these tactics or why you definitely shouldn't do them or whatever, or how.

To do it properly, or if you need some help.

Just write in, you know, how to reach us. And I guess until next time, that's everything for now.

Thank you. Goodbye.