Today I’m introducing a new segment on Sycosure called “Did You Get Bad SEO Advice?”

You see, every day, I have to read tons of anyeurism-inducing SEO advice on forums, Twitter, Facebook (especially Facebook), and the little Charlie blogs that pop up every now and then.

In order to alleviate some of the stress that comes with this job, I’ve decided to put together this segment where I not only tell you why the advice is bad, but I even link to trustworthy sources to prove my points.

Did You Get Bad SEO Advice? Find Out Here!

 November 21st, 2016: Meta Keywords

Are you kidding me? Meta keywords!? What decade is this clown from? This guy was tagged in a Facebook post, and less than 10 minutes later he came out with this half-baked SEO audit.

Why This Is Bad Advice

Let’s start with the “meta keywords”. Google themselves had stated back in 2009 that they do not use the keyword meta tag and there’s no news about the keyword meta tag suddenly being used by Google. Even before they published that article, they had ignored the keyword meta tag for years!

Moving on to the hastily-done SEO audit, no search engine optimiser worth their salt would ever say that any keyword is easy to rank for without doing any keyword research or determining the competition of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Finally, a real SEO audit will analyse your current on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, local SEO analytics data, search console data, etcetera. Speaking of local SEO, since this guy was responding to a request for a local search engine optimiser, why didn’t he bring up local citations?

Joker Rating: 

I give this guy 4 jokers out of 5. Believe it or not, I’ve seen worse. Way worse…

November 22nd, 2016: “Natural Link Building”

Natural link building… By artificially building links… Sigh…

Why This Is Bad Advice

DA, which stands for domain authority, is a 3rd party metric (i.e., has nothing to do with Google) that’s used to estimate a site’s ranking potential. They’e often criticised due to the fact that they’re easy to manipulate, but cowboy SEOs often rely on these metrics because they lack the skill to analyse a site’s ranking potential without them

Regarding the “natural link building” rubbish, all it takes is one Google search and one click of the mouse to see what’s wrong with this. In the “link schemes” section of the Google quality guidelines, it clearly states the following:

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.

This means that if you’re sitting around building 5 links per day and trying to figure which sites to place links on, you’re not “building links naturally”, you’re link scheming.

Joker Rating:

3 out of 5, because at least this guy wasn’t dishing out SEO advice from 1999.

November 23rd, 2016: “No Share Buttons = No Backlinks”

This guy actually gave some solid advice to a webmaster who was feeling down about not being able to rank his website. However, his second piece of advice where he said, “You have no share buttons on your website so how can you get backlinks which are a major higher ranking factor”, was terrible.

What This Is Bad Advice

The implication here is that you can’t get backlinks without share buttons, which simply isn’t true. While share buttons can help you get backlinks by making it easier for your visitors to share your content, it isn’t the only way to get backlinks. For example, people who are impressed by your work could simply, oh I don’t know, create a text link on their website linking back to your website. You know, something like “Lincolnshire Wedding Photographers” (you’re welcome, for what it’s worth).

Users with blogs can also get backlinks through outreach link building. You can also employ a content marketing strategy by creating shareable content, which is something I did in the first 2 years of starting this website.

If you want to go the “black hat” route, there are paid links, SAPE links, PBNs, and several other options you have for link building purposes.

Joker Rating:

1 out of 5. This Reddit member’s post actually wasn’t too bad overall.

Did You Receive Bad SEO Advice?

What’s the worst SEO advice you’ve ever received? Do you want to find out if YOU got bad SEO advice? Post the advice in the comments section or send it to me using my contact form. If it’s really bad, it’ll get featured right here in the main article.