Some of the SEO tactics being sold to you right now were killed off before the person selling them was even old enough to drive. Welcome to the graveyard.

Hi, I'm Nikki Pilkington. My site is https://nikki-pilkington.com/ and in this episode of "SEO F**king What", I'm digging up the corpses. I've been doing this for over 30 years, which means I was there when half these tactics were brand new and worked beautifully. I watched them get abused, I watched Google shut them down one by one, and I've watched every single one of them come back: dug up about five years later, given a fresh label, and sold to small businesses who weren't around the first time. These aren't tactics that went out of fashion. They're recalled products, and someone's repainted the box and put them back on the shelf.

Here's what I'm covering:

— The keywords meta tag: Google said it didn't use it for ranking in 2009, and I'm still seeing invoices for "keyword tagging"

— Hidden text and keyword stuffing, and why a keyword density report is just keyword stuffing with a spreadsheet stapled on it

— Exact match domains, and why buying bestplumberleeds.co.uk stopped being a strategy in 2012

— Doorway pages and their brand-new AI face: why 400 "programmatic SEO" location pages for a fixed fee is the same tactic Google went after in 2015

— Spun content, the content farms Google flattened, and the 300 unedited AI blog posts a month that have replaced them

— Submitting your site to 5,000 search engines (there weren't even 50), and why "get submitted to the AI engines" is the same racket with a new letterhead

— The three questions that tell you whether the tactic on your quote is alive or dead, and you don't need to know any SEO to ask them

I also give you a proper piece of homework. Two jobs, and neither will cost you a penny. Not the "might do that one day" kind. The actual do-it-this-week kind, including a quick view-source check that tells you whether somebody's already buried a corpse in your website.

If you know someone who's just been quoted for 400 location pages, send them this. It might save them a small fortune.

Get found. Make money. Stop stressing. And if a tactic has a golden era, you've missed it.

Chapters:

00:00 — Older than the people selling them

01:39 — The keywords meta tag

02:31 — Hidden text and keyword stuffing

03:02 — Keyword density: stuffing with a spreadsheet

03:28 — Exact match domains

04:14 — Doorway pages and their brand-new AI face

05:32 — Spun and mass-produced content

06:23 — Submitting to 5,000 search engines

07:45 — Three questions that spot the next one

09:17 — Homework: check your site for corpses

10:16 — The industry's memory is short on purpose

Links mentioned:

Non-Wanky SEO Courses (the On-Page SEO Toolkit is now free): https://nonwankyseo.com

Google: "Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking" (2009): https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag

Google's spam policies (hidden text, keyword stuffing, doorway abuse, scaled content abuse): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies

The episode on 2010 black hat tactics resold as AI growth hacks: [ADD EPISODE URL]

The episode on AI-built websites: [ADD EPISODE URL]

Follow Nikki:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkipilkington/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikkipilkington/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nikkipilkington.bsky.social

Mentioned in this episode:

ICN Network

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

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

Lemme introduce you to the graveyard.

This is SEO Fucking What.

I'm Nikki.

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

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

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

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

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

I watched them get abused.

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

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

industry hammers it until it's useless.

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

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

who weren't around the first time.

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

2010 getting resold as AI growth hacks.

This is a more detailed version.

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

the next one without needing me.

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

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

the box and put them back on the shelf.

So let's dig some up.

The keywords meta tag.

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

Search engines read it and ranked you on it.

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

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

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

keywords meta tag for ranking. 2009.

That's before some of you were born.

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

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

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

I've seen invoices for keyword tagging.

It does nothing.

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

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

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

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

This one's not just dead.

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

penalty, but it hasn't gone away.

It's just got a better vocabulary

now.

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

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

with a spreadsheet stapled on it.

Nobody at Google has ever publicised a keyword density

figure, because there isn't one.

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

is easier to sell than judgement.

And let's talk about exact match domains.

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

pages on it and rank for plumber in Leeds.

That was all you did.

That was the strategy.

The domain did the work.

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

dead as a strategy ever since.

But people still sell it.

I still get asked whether a business should buy a keyword

domain and run a second site on it.

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

splitting your effort and competing with your actual website.

Buy the domain if you want it for your brand.

Don't buy it

expecting the letters in the URL to rank you.

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

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

that's currently doing the rounds.

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

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

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

No real content, nobody covering those areas

anyway. And it worked for a bit.

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

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

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

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

location pages for a fixed fee.

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

It looks like amazing value.

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

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

that there's nothing on the page.

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

policy about it for about a decade.

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

We have spun and mass-produced content.

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

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

The results were unreadable. Genuinely fucking unreadable. Like something

translated four times and back again.

Google spent the early 2010s systematically flattening the

content farms built on it.

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

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

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

but understand where the tactic came from.

Publishing volume without substance is not a new idea.

It's an old idea with a better name.

And then we've got a lovely relic.

I love this one.

Submitting your website to a million search engines.

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

search engines. 5,000 search engines.

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

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

It became pointless

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

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

is not a thing anyone needs to buy.

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

"Get your site submitted to the AI engines."

"Get listed in ChatGPT." Special indexing services.

It's the same racket with a new letterhead.

Nobody has confirmed that any of the files and submission tricks

being sold get you listed anywhere.

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

So that's the graveyard.

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

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

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

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

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

First of all, when did this tactic start working?

Any tactic with a golden era is suspect.

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

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

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

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

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

And this is the killer question.

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

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

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

did the best. With dead tactics,

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

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

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

Almost every dead tactic has the same shape.

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

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

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

And manipulation plays get shut down.

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

So here's your homework.

Two jobs this week.

Neither of them are gonna cost you anything.

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

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

possibly with the best of intentions.

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

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

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

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

service pages that nobody wrote properly.

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

conversation with whoever made them.

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

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

When did it start working?

What happened to the people who did it hardest?

Does it only work at volume?

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

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

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

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

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

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

My On-Page SEO Toolkit is now free.

So help yourself.

You'll find it at nonwankyseo.com.

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

golden era, you've missed it.

And that's a good thing.