Old School SEO Techniques That Will Hurt Your Google Rankings

Is your SEO living in the past? Using old school methods of SEO can now really hurt your Google rankings and result in a penalty for it. What we’ve been seeing at i3 is that many companies are still performing SEO as if it were 7 or 8 years ago– so, here’s a few ways to tell if your SEO is behind the times.

Hidden Text is a huge no-no. You as a website visitor might not be able to see the white text on a white background, but you can bet that Google’s bots can.

Cloaking is the practice of showing different content to the spiders that crawl your site than what you show to your actual website visitors. Search engines don’t like it one bit, and no matter what your intentions are, they will see this as a negative aspect.

Duplicate content is another big no-no. Search engines only want to index original content, not the same thing 50 times.

Link Exchanges used to be a popular technique in the early days of the web, but it’s not really effective today. Link building should be a natural process and with websites relevant to your industry.