We all know the story. SEOs try their best to learn the skills, to learn the ‘methods’ and then, everything changes.

This keeps on happening after every few years. SEO strategies become obsolete, some become industry specific from being general and some go viral and become spammy.

In this article, I am going to talk about SEO strategies that no longer work in 2017. Ready? Follow along as I have prepared an interesting list for you.

Bot Written Content Based Methods

Whether you are building a PBN or a Web 2.0, if you are using a bot tool to write content for that site, you are wasting your time. It is not 2010 anymore and Google exactly knows what you are trying to do there.

Yes, PBNs & Web 2.0s still work, however, you have to take care of ‘em as real websites. They cannot be spammy any longer. It is only genuine topic relevant articles that matters these days when it comes to getting backlinks from Web 2.0s & PBNs.

More Links = Better Ranking

There was a time when life was simple for SEO specialists. One website has 100 backlinks, you just had to get 101 backlinks. We used to take 120 to be safe and boom! We were on the first position for that keyword.

However, the world has changed and this doesn’t work anymore. In fact, having more backlinks from weird sources can give you a Google penalty. It is the quality of the backlink that matters. If you can’t get a quality backlink, you can’t replace that with 50 spam or ‘easy’ backlinks.

Keyword Stuffing

There was a golden time back in the days for SEO professionals. You had to do the backlinks and you had to insert your keyword in the article title, body and in meta description as much as you could. That would do the job back in the days. However, that’s not the case anymore.

The term that we are referring to is called ‘keyword stuffing’ and it is considered as a manipulation of Google’s ranking algorithm now. If you are injecting your keyword inside an article without any reason or just to rank, you won’t get any help.

Easy Backlinks = Good Backlinks

We all know about those backlink methods, the doc sharing websites, the audio sharing websites and etc. which offer backlinks in exchange for literally anything. They don’t work anymore. Google now knows that you are being on those websites just to get a backlink without adding much value.

Also, those websites now have a high number of outbound links which reduces the power of each one of them. That’s another reason that why they don’t work anymore.

Thin Content Pages

Things that you do ‘on your website’ has never been more important than 2017. On Page SEO boomed this year and it is now very crucial that how you structure your website. Those days are gone when you could rank a page with 300 words in it in a competitive niche only with the power of SEO. You now need a good amount of authoritative content to rank a page higher.

Yes, those 300 word pages might still be ranking for low competition keywords but it is not a great path to take. Brian Dean from Backlinko did an analysis where he showed that the average 1st page results of Google now have at least 1800 words of content in them.

Focusing on Desktop Only

With the actions of Google, it is no brainer that they are putting on a mobile first hat when they are trying to rank websites on search results. Last year, Google released their mobile friendliness testing tool and this year, we all saw the boom of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology that wipes out all the unnecessary parts of your webpage to make it more viewable on mobile devices. If your website is not mobile friendly in 2017, you should not expect to rank for any keywords.

Also, it is rumored that Google is going to divide the search result in two separate departments which will be mobile and desktop departments. If they go for it, we will start seeing completely different results for searches from mobile and from desktop or laptops. We don’t know when that will start happening but I can assure you that Google will not announce it before rolling it out. Therefore, if you want to take that advantage, it is time to get involved in mobile readability.

Press Release

I know this might create controversy. But I had to share it with all of you. At Passive Journal, me & my team build and rank websites for clients on an everyday basis and we have tested it. In fact, we actually had our own Press Release service for a month too which we didn’t continue as it was not bringing in results.

Yes, a press release is going to get you hundreds of backlinks from websites that look great on naked eye. These are news type websites, they rank well on Google News & they all have decent DA (domain authority) & PA (page authority). However, they don’t do one thing which is making a positive impact on your rankings.

Google has never confirmed it but we have tested it with multiple websites and the result was always the same. We never could get a significant rank improve with press release compared to the effort that we made.

Ignoring Social Signals

This will be my last one for the article. Many still think that Google has nothing to do with the social signals that your website gets. After all, getting one share in Google+ or Pinterest is one backlink and getting 100 shares is still, one backlink. However, ignoring social signals is a big crime if you are a SEO professional in 2017.

Social signals (more shares, comments, involvements) tell Google that the content is being noticed by a lot of people and they are engaging with it. Therefore, the content is valuable. This creates an indirect effect on the rankings. We have seen on multiple occasions that websites without any ‘traditional SEO’ has ranked for low competition keywords only with the power of massive social share.

If you have a very low competition keyword, I recommend that you try with social media first to see if you can rank it before going full throttle on SEO.

That’ll be it for this article. I wish you all the best. We need better SEO professionals out there and I hope, this article helps in that cause.