You may remember the old days of SEO where you can easily use some techniques to rank up high, increase traffic, and ultimately get cash. While taking a trip down memory lane and reminiscing about the past, we can see how Google has adapted to the situation. These SEO “mistakes” are no longer considered being under the radar as Google continues to update Google Penguin and Google Panda.

SEO Mistake #1: Stuffing Keywords

Even just about a year ago, stuffing keyword tags was fairly simple. You can take keywords and put it everywhere you possibly could. Once Google caught on, you weren’t able to rank up if you had too much on your page. It made it hard to stuff keywords, but it was still possible to do it successfully.

What Google wants from your website is to sound natural as possible. When thinking about whether to optimize, you need to ask yourself if it sounds natural. Check the title tags and navigation as keyword stuffing is most common there.

SEO Mistake #2: Hiding the Text

It was easy to hide the text in your pages by using a matching color background with the same color font. By using this practice, people were able to stuff their websites with relevant keywords, while minimizing what actually appears on the page itself.

You might think this is a thing of the past, but similar practices are being doing today. Since people now use CSS, scripting techniques and making the font size 0 can hide things. Just a friendly tip though: it is NEVER ok to use size 0 fonts. In the end, hidden text is hidden text and Google will hit you with a penalty.

SEO Mistake #3: Buying Links

All you had to do back then was buy thousands of links and your website will skyrocket to the top of the ranks. As Google saw what was going on, Google devalued the links. It didn’t end there though. If a link got devalued, all you had to do was buy a new link.

In reality, very few sites have the power to be completely “white hat,” meaning natural. It is hard for them to sit around and wait for people to click on their links. The thing to remember is that Google penalizes both the link seller and the buyer equally.

SEO Mistake #4: Spamming Ads

Not too long ago, there were sites that existed mainly to display ads and ads alone. Whatever ad it might have been, one clear look can tell you that the site existed solely for the purpose of ads.

If I can tell you one thing, Google and excessive ads don’t go together. In fact, Google created an algorithm to punish sites that have too many ads on their homepage. So before you think about placing ads on your page, think about having an internally placed link that goes from your homepage to a new page.

SEO Mistake #5: Today’s SEO

Although these practices may still seem to work today, I can tell you that it won’t work for much longer. It is time to adapt to Google’s changes and evolve from the past. The very worst case scenario is that you would be de-indexed (Trust me, no one wants that). Why waste your efforts on doing practices Google penalizes when you can shift your focus on the practices Google rewards?