Some of the trends you read below still work to some extent! The real truth is that many of these were SEO fads that went out just as fast as they came in. Why did these SEO trends catch on in the first place? Well, in just about every case there was huge money to be made. Either as a direct result of a layered technique, these methods brought in serious money to those that were using them
Today you will find that many of these techniques are obsolete and if they do work will not sustain a ranking for an extended period of time. I do not advocate any of these techniques if you are trying to build a long lasting business with your website.
1) Digital Point Co-op
Around 2004 Shawn Hogan the owner of Digital Point Forums created the Digital Point Co-op Network. The Co-op gave you link weight based on how many pages you displayed the Co-op ads on. A large website or forum could generate a fairly good amount of weight. The weight you receive could be used to point anchor text links to your websites.
For a few years, the Co-op was extremely effective in ranking in Google. Just about everyone I know experimented with this network at one point or another including myself. In early 2006 I used the Co-op to make over $85,000 per month in affiliate leads. The Co-op weight I had was enough to place boost my webpage to the #2 spot for a huge keyword.
Like most SEO trends Google eventually got wise and devalued links coming from this network.
2) Link Wheels
Link wheels use bookmaking and Web 2.0 type of websites to obtain do-follow links from free sources. The premises behind this is that it’s supposed to build up some link juice to your website.
There have been several different methods of link wheels including the round robin and horseshoe methods. Basically, a profile is created on a free website and links to another free website. In most cases, the free websites link out to your website and to another free website that has your link as well.
3) Article Spinners
Creating unique content is not the easiest nor the cheapest thing to do. Why pay someone to write hundreds of articles when you can write one and have a computer program do it for you. Spinners take one article then replace and rearrange the words and sentences around providing a unique article, kind of.
Some spinners are better than others but most can be detected nowadays. Again, Google Panda hit this type of content.
4) Keyword Stuffing
Remember the days when you could just add a keyword to the bottom of a page and you ranked well? I remember going to some websites and seeing the same keywords repeated over and over again. Back in the early days of the search engines, the race was to see how many keywords you can stuff on your pages. When we look back at this method we laugh at how silly it was.
In more recent years the keyword stuffing has looked better but is still noticeable. Some websites tried to get every keyword they could write into their web copy. When you read articles from this website they often didn’t make a lot of sense.
Over the past, seven to eight years’ keyword density has been discussed often. Too many webmasters focus on this. Some actually believe their rankings will skyrocket if they get the perfect keyword density. Write for your readers and not for search engines.
5) Blog Networks
This SEO technique worked for a long time up until a few months ago. Basically, blogs were created for the sole purpose of adding links to them. Often times this content was duplicate articles snatched up from a free article directory. Many of these blogs were expired domains that had some links pointing to them and a little PageRank.
This was extremely effective because Google loves links within content. In March of 2012 Google finally detected what seems like a majority of these blog networks and de-indexed the domains.
6) Hidden Text
This is really old school and I haven’t seen this for a while. Some years back in order to keyword stuff websites would use hidden text.
There are two ways to use hidden text. Usually, both of these were done near the bottom of the page. You either use the same color font as the background or you make the font so small it is not legible by the human eye.
7) Automated software
It’s no secret that Google loves content but until recently Google had a hard time differentiating between good content and bad. Automatically generated keyword pages where all the rage until February 2011 when Google Panda came along.
Prior to Google Panda, you could create thousands if not millions of keyword targeted pages and receive good traffic from their search engine. Auto blogs were self-updating blogs that webmasters could create, turn on and forget about. Within six months to a year, you would have hundreds if not thousands of auto-generated content driving your traffic.
8) Squidoo Lens Creations
If there is a cheap or free way to create links it will become a trend. Squidoo is a free website that allows users to create content and add their links. Squidoo lens creation services still exist today. For a few dollars, someone will create an article on Squidoo and link to your website in it.
This isn’t the worst SEO technique but some people seemed to rely too heavily on this. Ok, so you wrote a good lens and you have promoted it. Good job! Now move on and don’t get caught up in this fade. A Squidoo lens will not get you ranked for your keyword unless your keyword is obscure and not competitive.
9) Free Directories
There are a plethora of free directories today. Most are just link farms that people think will help. Google loves a diverse link portfolio and thinking you can rank based off of 1,000 free directory submission is a sad reality.
Back when a link was just a link this was an effective strategy, just not in 2012 or the past six years for that matter. Not all free directories are bad but you can easily point out the ones that are abusing anchor text.
10) Mulitple Websites
Why not dominate Google with several websites on the same theme. Years ago you could gain two to three of the top spots in a search engine by having multiple websites. This meant a great deal more income for your company. Sure this still goes on today but is far less effective than what it used to be. Back in the day, it was fairly common for many companies to have several websites all targeted at the same thing.
This is still very common in some of the services industries but Google has taken notice. What’s the point of having several websites? Google often times see this as spammy and will take action.
11) Paid / Sponsored Reviews
Paying someone to write a review just to get a link. Seems simple an easy but Google doesn’t want those links to pass PageRank. Before Google started their war on paid links this was an easy way to get links. In fact, many of the top SEO experts recommended this as a viable way to obtain links.
Sometimes it makes sense to have a sponsored review if you are looking to gain some traffic or exposure for your company. This became an SEO trend when webmasters thought that buying these sponsored reviews was going to help their rankings. If a website has a disclosure policy about getting paid for reviews it’s doubtful your link is going to count.
12) Blog Commenting Service
Do-follow blogs allow links in their comments to count. Instead of having the universal no-follow tag it’s been removed. This allows anyone and their mother to post comments with keyword rich links to websites.
Sadly, this type of link still works today. Not consistently but often. In some of the more competitive industries, you can see websites in the top ten results that rank mostly because of their blog comments. I would imagine over the next year Google will tweak their algorithm to discount these. Don’t fall in love with these type of links.
13) Multiple Sub-domains
Dominating the SERPS was pretty easy when using multiple sub-domains. In fact, there were several ways multiple sub-domains were used. One way was to leverage to the authority of the main domain to target a new subject. A great example of this was a PR6 SEO website that created a sub-domain to target pharmaceutical related searches. The other way was to dominate a search term to take up more than the typical two spots.
