What are some bad SEO methods that exist and are still being used today?

TommyCarey

lol I've had to fix so many problems with my clients websites

I'll go over a few that I see every month.

Keyword Stuffing:
I've had so many of my clients hire me and then I have to take a week rewriting all their content because what they thought was a good way to write, was actually horrible and had tons of keyword stuffing. There are normally two types of keyword stuffing that I deal with and they are as follows

In content keyword stuffing - This is where they would write up a sentence and it would become jibberish because of all the keywords jammed into it. This will just obtain a penalty even though they think they're doing something right. The sentence looks horrible, but they think they're being tricky lol. For example, if their keyword was "Dog Wash" (without quotes obviously): Our dog wash service is the best dog wash because our dog washers are top notch!
In the footer keyword stuffing - Another bad one I see is when my clients jam as many of their keywords into the footer as they can. Normally when I see this it's for local businesses trying to get a specific town with their keyword into it and they place it in their footer because they read an article from 1999 saying this was a good thing to do. An example of this would be when I go to their site and se their "Service Areas" and they are Town A Cleaning Service, Town B Cleaning Service, Town C Cleaning Service, Town D Cleaning Service, and so on. There are ways to do this to avoid a keyword stuffing penalty, but a lot of new website owners won't bother making sub pages filled with optimized content on their keyword Town A Cleaning Service and the rest.

Hidden Text:
I don't see this one as much anymore because it's a pretty horrible way to try and trick the search engines. Hidden text is when someone puts a bunch of text, mainly keywords, into the background of their pages and they hide the keywords by making the font color the same as the background of the websites page. This is an extremely easy way to make Google, Yahoo! and Bing to hate you

lol I've had to fix so many problems with my clients websites :D I'll go over a few that I see every month. [size=200][b]Keyword Stuffing:[/b][/size] I've had so many of my clients hire me and then I have to take a week rewriting all their content because what they thought was a good way to write, was actually horrible and had tons of keyword stuffing. There are normally two types of keyword stuffing that I deal with and they are as follows [list][*][u][b]In content keyword stuffing -[/b][/u] This is where they would write up a sentence and it would become jibberish because of all the keywords jammed into it. This will just obtain a penalty even though they think they're doing something right. The sentence looks horrible, but they think they're being tricky lol. For example, if their keyword was "Dog Wash" (without quotes obviously): Our dog wash service is the best dog wash because our dog washers are top notch![/*][*][u][b]In the footer keyword stuffing[/b] [b]-[/b][/u] Another bad one I see is when my clients jam as many of their keywords into the footer as they can. Normally when I see this it's for local businesses trying to get a specific town with their keyword into it and they place it in their footer because they read an article from 1999 saying this was a good thing to do. An example of this would be when I go to their site and se their "Service Areas" and they are Town A Cleaning Service, Town B Cleaning Service, Town C Cleaning Service, Town D Cleaning Service, and so on. There are ways to do this to avoid a keyword stuffing penalty, but a lot of new website owners won't bother making sub pages filled with optimized content on their keyword Town A Cleaning Service and the rest.[/*][/list] [size=200][b]Hidden Text:[/b][/size] I don't see this one as much anymore because it's a pretty horrible way to try and trick the search engines. Hidden text is when someone puts a bunch of text, mainly keywords, into the background of their pages and they hide the keywords by making the font color the same as the background of the websites page. This is an extremely easy way to make Google, Yahoo! and Bing to hate you :D

9 years ago