Outdated SEO activities you should avoid

Some of the SEO tactics was more effective few years ago, but nowadays (2025) it is not more effective practices to improve rankings. Better you should avoid these outdated SEO Activities to hold from lose rankings. If you avoid these mentioned outdated SEO Tactics, your website and brand name can secure from big lose of website traffic.

Buying Links
Targeting Exact match Search Phrase
Bad Content
Keyword misuse
Spinning Articles
Exact Match Domains
Anchor Text
Pages for all Keyword Variations

1. Buying Links

A few years ago, buying links was continuous activity. Because this process is easy to pay quickly and get high volume of backlinks pointing your website. Because of pointing more links to the website, MOZ gives High DA and ranking keywords within top 5 position in Google.

But now, Google gives more priority to build links manually. And need to maintain and optimize the backlink profiles like own websites. When we create backlinks need to concentrate more on high quality domains instead of low quality domains.

Because if you concentrate on low quality domains and creating too many backlinks, Google easily find those low quality links and remove or won’t be consider as backlinks count.

In 2025, if you want to boost your website Domain Authority and Page Authority, you need to do links manually, not paying somebody and increase quantity of backlinks.

2. Targeting Exact Match search phrase

For Example: If you have “Digital Marketing Consultant”, wanted to popular your brand name and rank it highly on Google. First step what everybody will do, They will concentrate on the Exact match Keyword “Digital Marketing Consultant”.

Optimize the exact query in different places in the website like Headings Tags, Meta Title & Description, Alt Text, create Internal Links to get high ranking for the particular keyword on search engines.

But nowadays search engine gives ranking for user friendly search queries. (i.e.,) what users need and how they will search on Google to get their requirement. So need to optimize long tail keywords to get better rankings for highly competitive keywords.

3. Bad Content

Few years ago, there was a time to rank low quality content in Google.

How should find low quality content?

Keyword Stuffed Content

Stolen Content

Thin Content (less number of words)

Once upon a time Google were crawl those bad content and gives worthy results regularly. But now it is no more…. If your content quality is good, then your website will be awarded best by search engines. Because search engines knows it very well “which one is good” and “which one is bad”. So if you need to succeed at SEO, concentrate on quality content.

4. Keyword Misuse

Keyword Misuse including irrelevant Keyword Targeting, writing content for a particular keyword density and keyword stuffing.

Irrelevant Usage: If a marketers need to rank high volume keywords, they don’t think about the users. They will only concentrate on how to rank top on search engine. In this situation, marketers are losing the attention from the readers. Google prefers to improve ranking only when the right message is communicating to the readers.

Obviously High Volume Keywords will increase content visibility if it is ranking on top in search engines. But don’t try to mislead readers to the wrong content. This is also called as “Black Hat SEO Technique” which Google does not prefer to rank on top pages.

Keyword Density: Keyword Density will play an important role to rank keywords top position on search engines. Now Google not depending on Keyword Density. Google check whether your website pages are an effective thing for answering the search users.

The quality of the content and the quality of the message conveying are the two most important and updated SEO factors.

Keyword Stuffing: One of the oldest SEO factor marketers follows. Because SEO is all about Keywords right?

What marketers does? Adding high search volume keywords wherever possible in the website as many times to rank high in search engines.

But absolutely not now. Google prefers natural combination of text. If your website has the quality natural content, your targeted keywords will rank on top search page. So Don’t try to do keyword stuffing in your website. This is one of the outdated SEO factor should avoid doing it.

5. Spinning Articles

One of the most important technique to rank your website is obliviously content marketing. So what marketers and startup companies does?

They will try to spin and post others high quality and trending articles to rank their website on top. There are so many online free tools and software are available to spin your article. Generate articles through online tools is an easiest way to reproduce the content.

Still it is low quality than what human can write articles. Google rank only the content which are useful and helpful for the users.

6. Exact Match Domains

Having High Volume Keywords on the domain name makes sense, but not now. One of the best practices to rank your website concentrate on your brand name, your products and services, not high volume keywords.

Exact match high volume keywords buying is an outdated SEO Technique. It does not gives website traffic and keyword ranking.

7. Anchor Text

Mostly anchor text will use to create internal links. Because internal links also one of the major On-page Optimization Technique. We can do internal links for the human not for the search engines.

SEO Specialist use to give anchor text to the exact match keyword or brand name to rank their website higher.

But it is no more as i said website should be more natural and user friendly content. When you try to optimize for search engine instead of search users, you will fail on top ranking.

8. Pages for All Keywords Variations

This is one of the most outdated SEO tactics and non acceptable factor by Google. If someone have Digital Marketing Business in Chennai, obviously they need promotion for your brand. First promotion would be SEO optimization for your website.

You will start with researching relevant keywords for your industry. There will be couple of high volume keywords you wanted to rank in search engines.

What Marketers does?

For Example: The Keywords are “Digital Marketing Company” & “Digital Marketing Consultant”

Both Keywords are high monthly search and most competitive keywords. For these two variations of keywords, marketers will create two pages like

www.yourbrandname.com/digital-marketing-company

www.yourbrandname.com/digital-marketing-consultant

Both keywords says the same meaning, only keywords variations are different. You should avoid creating multiple pages for different keywords variation. Create pages based on your business service which helps for the users not for search engines.

Conclusion:

If you avoid above mention outdated SEO Techniques, you can secure your website from lose ranking on search engines. Follow the steps and increase your website visibility.