Seeing this everywhere from bloggers, “Google nuked my traffic to my crappy, no-effort articles that didn’t benefit the reader in any way and didn’t have the intent to benefit the reader in any way, WAAAAAAAAH!”
Thank goodness Google finally nuked these sites, and good riddance. For years Google was almost useless because the only articles that came up for my inquiries were spam. But those blogs and websites have been cleared out in favor of articles that actually matches the search intent of the reader.
Not only do stupid tactics not work that make articles unreadable (e.g. Keyword Stuffing) but now these blogs are penalized, meaning they are buried dozens of pages deep in the search results.
Google traffic is back in play for real bloggers.
Tricks That Don’t Work Anymore
If your SEO guru is pushing any of these tactics, they are scamming you.
1. Keyword Stuffing
Back in the day we were forced to read sentences like “the best blogging strategy can be found in my course about the best blogging strategy, which goes over multiple best blogging strategy for blogging strategy that are the best.”
The same bloggers who wrote sentences like that are the same ones crying about how Google is being mean to them, goodness, in my opinion those bloggers should be banned from the internet for crimes against sentence structures!
Google is bots are so good they do more than just keywords, they know if the intent of the article matches the intent of the searcher.
2. Buying Backlinks
Google used to assume if a website or article had a lot links to it that meant it was hot stuff. Scammers quickly figured this out and built backlink farms for their own websites and for others to purchase links.
Popular bloggers would even earn good money just from people paying them to link to their articles. Luckily, those popular bloggers have been nuked.
And now, you actually want to disown any links to your site that look spammy, or you’ll get penalized. (Google it).
3. Hidden Text (Highlight The Empty Space Below)
What SEO bloggers used to do is do Keyword Stuffing that the reader couldn’t see but crawlers from Google did see. The simplest way they did this was to type the same keyword over again, again, again, again, again, and again and then turn the text white. Thousands of times the keyword would be written. Then the Google crawlers assumed, “Wow, this is super relevant to this topic because the keyword appears 10,000 times in this article, let’s give this the number one spot on the Google search results!”
And notice how I’m literally demonstrating some of these banned SEO tactics on my own blog? I’m not scared of penalties. It’s because Google is so good now that they know the difference between my article, which is useful, versus somebody following an SEO course that says to do stuff like this, which will get them absolutely nuked. The SEO scammer guru will just say, “Oh well, you really need to purchase the upsell to truly unlock SEO magic. Upsell only costs $97!”
4. Comment Spam
I wrote an article about comment sections being ghost towns these days, that’s largely because bloggers were motivated to leave comments for the purpose of dropping their links, which gave precious backlinks.
Google ignores links in comment sections now, and if Google detects spamming behavior it will penalize the culprit.
Of course, naive me thought people were leaving comments because they really wanted to be part of the conversation! (Okay, many people did want to, in good-faith, be a part of the conversation. There were other factors in play. Read my ghost town comment section article)
5. Writing Articles With AI
When AI first hit the scene people were spamming articles left and right, blogs would pop up overnight with a thousand AI written articles.
Yup, those blogs got nuked. If readers want AI articles, they’ll generate the articles themselves, and Google knows this.
If people go to blogs, it means they want good old fashioned human writing. Don’t use AI to write articles! You will get nuked!
What To Do Instead For SEO
Some tips:
1. E-E-A-T
Google measures if an article if it is good by E-E-A-T, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
- Experience: Does the author demonstrate they have a sound understanding of the topic? Does the author appear to have first-hand knowledge?
- Expertise: Does the author demonstrate a deep knowledge of the field in question?
- Authoritativeness: Is the author considered a leader in the field? Are there non-spammy backlinks from other quality websites on the subject?
- Trustworthiness: Is the author honest and accurate? (Lots of scammers out there!)
The E-E-A-T model was developed by having human readers rate articles and websites and then Google’s SEO AI was trained on that data.
2. User Experience
This is another way to say that your blog must load fast. Lean and mean is the name of the game. Don’t use clunky page builders to power your blogs even though everyone recommends them.
Why does everybody recommend them? BIG AFFILIATE MONEY PAYOUTS. You can automatically dismiss everything a blogger says if they recommend a page builders. They do not have your best interest in mind at all. They are only trying to increase the numbers on their income reports. A blogger that recommends a page builders is trying to scam you. Not a very good user experience!
3. Topic Clusters
Don’t write a single article about a single subject and call it a day.
Google wants to see at least a dozen articles on a specific subject before they are gonna rank you. (This goes back to E-E-A-T).
For your blog, the best practice is to stick with a subject for a dozen or twenty articles before moving on to your next subject. Fill it up!
4. Long Form Articles
500 word articles aren’t going to cut it. Articles need to be at least 1,000 words or Google isn’t going to care what you have to say, and frankly, neither would I as a reader.
Blog readers love to read. Give them something to read! Don’t fill it with fluff either. If you can’t reach a thousand words then your article should be a point in a larger article or a tweet.
5. Write Articles You Would Want To Read
You’re a blog snob, aren’t you?
I believe so, everybody around here is a blog snob.
Use yourself to measure if the article is good or not. Would you consider the article you just read to be a good article? Very simple! Give the readers something good to read!
The name of the blogging game is to focus on QUALITY.