Dead SEO Tactics, Dug Up and Resold as "AI Hacks", FFS

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Some of the SEO tactics being sold to you right now were

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killed off before the person selling them was even old enough to drive.

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Lemme introduce you to the graveyard.

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This is SEO Fucking What.

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I'm Nikki.

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I've been doing this for over 30 years, way back before anyone called it SEO,

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and I help small business owners actually make money from their websites.

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Now, I've got an advantage over most people talking about SEO online, and

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it's not that I'm cleverer than them. It's that I was there. I was doing

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this when half these tactics were brand new and worked beautifully.

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I watched them get abused.

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I watched Google shut them down one by one, and I've watched every single

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one of them come back. A tactic works, word gets around, and then every chancer in the

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industry hammers it until it's useless.

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Google closes the door, and then about five years later, somebody digs

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it up, puts a fresh label on it, and starts selling it to small businesses

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who weren't around the first time.

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I did an episode a while back about being tired of black hat tactics from

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2010 getting resold as AI growth hacks.

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This is a more detailed version.

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This is the actual list, and, more importantly, it's how you spot

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the next one without needing me.

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These tactics are recalled products. Not products that went out of fashion,

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products that were pulled because they were dangerous, and someone has repainted

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the box and put them back on the shelf.

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So let's dig some up.

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The keywords meta tag.

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We used to stuff a hidden list of keywords into the code of every page.

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Search engines read it and ranked you on it.

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It was fantastic while it lasted, which was until roughly everyone realised

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you could type in whatever you liked, including your competitors' names.

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Google confirmed publicly in about 2009 that it doesn't use the

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keywords meta tag for ranking. 2009.

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That's before some of you were born.

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And yet I still open up small business websites and find them full.

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I still see SEO plugins with a keywords box in them, which

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people dutifully fill in every week thinking they're doing something.

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I've seen invoices for keyword tagging.

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It does nothing.

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It has done nothing for the entire time that some of these agencies have existed.

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And then we have hidden text and keyword stuffing. White text on a white background,

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keyword list crammed into the footer in three-point font, repeating "commercial

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office services Manchester" 40 times down a page until it reads like a ransom note.

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This one's not just dead.

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It's against Google's spam policies, and it can get you a manual

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penalty, but it hasn't gone away.

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It's just got a better vocabulary

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now.

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If someone gives you a report telling you your page needs the phrase in it

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11 or more times to hit a target percentage, that is keyword stuffing

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with a spreadsheet stapled on it.

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Nobody at Google has ever publicised a keyword density

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figure, because there isn't one.

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It was invented by the people who sell you tools, because a number

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is easier to sell than judgement.

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And let's talk about exact match domains.

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There was a golden run where you could buy bestplumberleeds.co.uk, put four

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pages on it and rank for plumber in Leeds.

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That was all you did.

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That was the strategy.

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The domain did the work.

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And again, Google went after it in 2012 specifically, and it's been

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dead as a strategy ever since.

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But people still sell it.

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I still get asked whether a business should buy a keyword

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domain and run a second site on it.

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And what you end up with is a thin little site nobody trusts,

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splitting your effort and competing with your actual website.

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Buy the domain if you want it for your brand.

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Don't buy it

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expecting the letters in the URL to rank you.

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And so we come to doorway pages and their brand-new AI face.

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This is the one I want you to pay proper attention to, because it's the corpse

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that's currently doing the rounds.

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The old version was, you generate hundreds of near-identical pages,

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one for every town in the country. Accountant in Bolton, accountant in

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Wigan, accountant in Warrington. Same page, town name swapped out.

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No real content, nobody covering those areas

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anyway. And it worked for a bit.

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Google announced they were going after doorway pages in 2015, and that was that.

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The new version is exactly the same thing, except now it's called

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programmatic SEO or scaled content, and it's built with AI in an afternoon.

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Instead of paying an intern over three months, someone will sell you 400

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location pages for a fixed fee.

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They'll show you a spreadsheet of keywords you're now targeting.

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It looks like amazing value.

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Just look at all these pages. It's the same tactic.

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It failed then for the same reason it's going to fail again, which is

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that there's nothing on the page.

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You don't serve half those places, and Google has had a specific

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policy about it for about a decade.

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Just because it's cheaper to produce doesn't make it new.

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We have spun and mass-produced content.

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We used to run articles through spinning software that swapped words for synonyms,

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so you could publish the same piece 50 times without it looking duplicated.

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The results were unreadable. Genuinely fucking unreadable. Like something

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translated four times and back again.

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Google spent the early 2010s systematically flattening the

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content farms built on it.

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Now the same idea comes back as 300 blog posts a month, generated, unedited.

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Nobody reads them, and they sit there dragging your site down.

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I've done a whole episode on AI-built websites, so I won't go over that ground,

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but understand where the tactic came from.

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Publishing volume without substance is not a new idea.

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It's an old idea with a better name.

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And then we've got a lovely relic.

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I love this one.

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Submitting your website to a million search engines.

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We used to pay for services that would submit your site to 5,000

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search engines. 5,000 search engines.

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There weren't 5,000 search engines. There weren't even 50.

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Most of the list was link pages and directories that nobody visited.

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It became pointless

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the moment Google got good at crawling the web, which was quite a long time ago.

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Google finds you by following links and reading your sitemap. Submission

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is not a thing anyone needs to buy.

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And you can see this one twitching back to life right now.

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"Get your site submitted to the AI engines."

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"Get listed in ChatGPT." Special indexing services.

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It's the same racket with a new letterhead.

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Nobody has confirmed that any of the files and submission tricks

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being sold get you listed anywhere.

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And being mentioned by an AI is not the same as ranking anyway.

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So that's the graveyard.

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But the point of this episode isn't the history lesson.

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It's that there'll be a new one along in about six weeks, and I'd

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quite like you to spot it yourself. After the break, I'll give you the

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questions that tell you whether the tactic on your quote is alive or dead.

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Okay, three questions, and you can ask all of them without knowing any SEO.

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First of all, when did this tactic start working?

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Any tactic with a golden era is suspect.

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If the honest answer is "this was brilliant in 2011", you're

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being sold a rebuild of something that already got closed down.

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Real SEO advice doesn't have a golden era, because it's mostly boring,

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like clear page titles and service pages that explain what you do.

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Then ask, what happened to the people who did this the hardest?

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And this is the killer question.

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But every tactic in that graveyard, there will be a group of people who

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went at it harder than anyone else. Find out what happened to them.

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Because with real tactics, the people who did the most of it

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did the best. With dead tactics,

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the people who did the most of it got flattened, and the people

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who sold it to them moved on to the next thing without a scratch.

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And finally, ask them, does this only work at volume?

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Almost every dead tactic has the same shape.

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It only pays off if you do a stupid amount of it.

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Hundreds of pages, thousands of submissions, 50 spun articles.

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If the pitch depends on scale rather than quality, it's a manipulation play.

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And manipulation plays get shut down.

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That's the whole pattern, from the keywords meta tag to AI location pages.

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So here's your homework.

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Two jobs this week.

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Neither of them are gonna cost you anything.

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Number one, go and check your own site for corpses.

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Somebody might have done this to you already, possibly years ago,

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possibly with the best of intentions.

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Click on one of your pages, view page source, search for the word "keywords".

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If there's a meta keywords tag stuffed with phrases, it's doing nothing,

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and it's telling you something about whoever built the site.

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Then go into your pages list and look for batches of near-identical location or

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service pages that nobody wrote properly.

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If you find 40 pages you didn't know you had, that's your next

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conversation with whoever made them.

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Number two, take whatever's currently on your quote or your monthly invoice or what

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people are asking you to pay, and run it through those three questions we just did.

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When did it start working?

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What happened to the people who did it hardest?

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Does it only work at volume?

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If a tactic falls over on all three, you've just found some budget.

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The thing I want you to take away is that the industry's memory is short on purpose.

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Nobody selling you scaled content wants to talk about doorway pages, because

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the moment you know the history, you can see what you're buying.

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If this was useful, follow SEO Fucking What wherever you are listening, so you get

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the next one, and send it to anyone who's just been quoted for 400 location pages.

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My On-Page SEO Toolkit is now free.

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So help yourself.

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You'll find it at nonwankyseo.com.

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Until next time, get found, make money, and if a tactic has a

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golden era, you've missed it.

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And that's a good thing.