Ask anyone about SEO and they will tell you that it's still relevant today. But Google has changed the playing field and what was acceptable before is now way out of line. You have to make sure that you aren't inadvertently doing anything wrong. This guide is going to introduce you to seven off page SEO techniques you should avoid, either because they are irrelevant or are black hat.
1.Forum Marketing
Forum marketing is not black hat as such. It's the act of answering questions on various forums. You are trawling everything to find areas where you can mention your brand. This is just time-consuming and completely unnecessary. You are better off spending your time on more important areas of your business because the SEO value is tiny.
2.Search Engine Submission
Submitting your website to search engines used to be a common way of making sure that Google and Bing indexed your site. Again, this is another wasteful technique because the search engines are more sophisticated than ever before. They index websites instantly.
3.Article Directories
Producing content for article directories used to be the most common way of content marketing. But the vast majority of people don't actually read these websites. The likes of Ezine are nearly dead because they are so full of pointless articles stuffed with nonsense.
During Google Panda, these were the first websites to suffer from severe losses in traffic.
4.Website Directories
Website directories were a great idea to start with, but today it's clear that website directories serve no real purpose. They are only lists of websites that nobody actually goes to. What's the point of searching for a website in a directory when Google can do the same job faster?
Someone may submit your website on your behalf, but it's hardly necessary and it won't offer any real benefits.
5.Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking websites like Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon can be good if you go viral, but the chances of going viral are slim. Furthermore, they are updated extremely quickly, so if you post something then it could be gone by the time you return the next day.
6.Linking on Other Blogs
Some websites used to produce comments for blogs. These comments rarely added anything to the conversation. Instead, they were there to add links to the commenter's website. When link building was huge, this was an effective way of driving traffic to your website.
But today that has all changed and it's no longer an effective method of driving traffic. Plus most websites ban links to external websites in the comments anyway.
7.Mass Social Media Production
You may think that it's a good idea to be on as many social media channels as possible, but that's not the case. On the contrary, it's one of the worst things you can do because you are stretching your resources thin. A lot of social media networks aren't relevant to your business. You need to be on the networks that are relevant to you and nowhere else.
It's best to be on just a selected number of social media networks, so you can concentrate just on those audiences. It will ultimately lead to a better outcome in the long-term.
Final Say
These seven off page SEO techniques are both outdated and ineffective. If you want to succeed in getting your website up the search rankings, you need to act in the right way. Stay away from these seven options to ensure that you are going to get the most from your efforts.
What do you think is the best off page SEO technique in use today?