I can only say about the well known dead SEO tactics such as keyword overuse and domain keyword match losing some ground especially when the site isn't exactly about what the keyword is about.

Also having keyword rich links are growing in shadiness because it looks too over-optimized.

PRs are losing ground too unless you do it exactly right by having really great PR in reputable PR sites.

Basically all well known SEO tactics that looks too overused have warning flags except basic semantic SEO (using the right HTML code in the right places).

Link building is also a tricky one especially if the rate of backlinks seems unnatural.

SEO tactics that are dead? It depends who you ask. When it comes to avoiding penalties many tactics have gone the way of the buffalo.

When it comes to Churn and Burn almost everything is still fair game. I suspect Google is already beginning to address Churn and Burn.

If you think about automation, or tactics that use involve posting to a widely distributed CMS on any type of large scale it's pretty obvious to G.

When was the last time anyone saw a site like BBC, or Wiki with backlinks from only a select few platforms?

Think about how we find these platforms. Footprints. Well not only does Google have the ability and resources to find these footprints they can do it 100000000000x better and a scale well beyond what any of us are capable of.

They identify patterns across the web and are able to identify what patterns are associated with "trusted" sites (probably there's a seed list?) and identify what patterns are associated with low quality sites.

It's just a matter of sending the right signals. Enter PBNs (or writing quality content and doing real marketing whatever your bag is). PBNs (I mean real private ones) are next on the target list, and are also the most difficult to target because they offer the SEO full control over the site and the links.

Even then many lazy SEOs leave footprints everywhere. I imagine they will try to flag these algorithmically and with a 10 second manual look will be able to take down many of these networks.

One of my competitors has a network of 60 sites, each with 5 hand spun articles, and each one of these PBNs have 5 posts that address the same 5 same topics. 60 blogs and they all link out to the same 5 sites on completely unrelated subjects. Talk about a easy target?

Site A has 50 backlinks and every single backlink is blocking the same bots in the same order in Robots.txt? Might be a reason for G to have a look.

Or for the expired domain miners maybe devalue the juice from links to a domain after the domain has expired for X number of years?

It's only a matter of time. They will take action. These networks are nothing new, but they had more prudent issues which for the most part they've been doing a pretty good job at cleaning up.

Sad to say, but the days of the Wild West internet might be coming to a close. When Bob in his basement,sh$$ stained underwear, beer in hand, can compete directly with a large brand in the SERP. Maybe I'm a pessimist, I sure hope I'm wrong. That was the beauty of the early internet. Ten years ago Google's CEO said it himself, "the internet is a cesspool" ...and what a beautiful cesspool it was and could still be.

Hey,

I would say the SEO tactics that are dying and just about dead would be only writing for the search engine. In other words, keyword stuffing.

Google web crawlers are much more advanced now, and they immediately notice content that is not unique, and not written for a REAL person!

You don't want your blog posts too keyword dense, but sprinkle a couple variations of your keyword throughout your content to make it flow and you should be alright.

Hope this was helpful!

-Josh

Haven't noticed anything.

You're planting seeds of hysteria for newbies to fertilize.

The ONLY change I've seen as of late is it just takes a bit longer to rank. That's it. And I can't even prove this yet - it's still just a suspicion of mine.

Network links still work. Tiered backlinking still works great for parasite SEO. But what works best is the following -

1) Large site. I always make my sites a minimum of 40% the size of my #1 competitor. If I can't get that much content done I won't build the site at all. Because one thing I've noticed for a fact, Google LOVES bigger sites. All my thinner sites (under 50 pages) refuse to crack the top 3 no matter how good the links are. They get stuck on the bottom of page 1 or the top of page 2 forever. So these days I'm beefing up my sites as much as possible. With big domains, even young domains, I can crack the top 3 usually in 2-3 months max.

2) Network links. They still work fine.

3) Highly restricted GSA campaigns for diversification.

3) Non-restricted GSA campaigns for a churn and burn site or long term parasite SEO (youtube, facebook, blogger, etc).

4) Aged domains. If you have aged domains, links with strong DA, well diversified, lots of content, you can rank.

Blog comments can still drive traffic but even 3 years ago I wasn't able to rank shit with them.

So the only real changes I've seen is there seems to be a grace period now, or delay before you rank. And it doesn't necessarily take "longer" to rank. Because sites crawl up the SERPs much faster when they DO rank. Like a site will stay out of the top 100 for 4 weeks, then after 6 weeks it shoots up to page 2, then page 1, then cracks the top 3.

In the past sites would hit page 9, then page 7, then page 5, etc etc.

They don't seem to be doing that anymore.

To sum up, I do believe things have changed but I don't think anything is dead or dying.

-RS

Back in 2009 I used to rank with pure blog comment spam from scrapebox, that doesn't work anymore at all.

Any links generated using software don't work nowhere near as well. I think google are doing a good job at suffocating black hatters, link building is now all about risk management.

Here is what my SEO guy is saying about ranking blog/websites....
He is telling me to slowly build links to my domain only...nothing to the actual pages except for social signals...It's slowly working as much of the content I posted in January-February is now climbed from a beginning rank of 80-100 to 15-30, with a few select pages on page 1.

It's a long process, I'd rather it take 6 months as opposed to a quick hit and a penalty.

One thing i think is dying is keyword checking. People think that since there's so much competition, not to check for certain keywords is okay. Nope its always important to check.

I think tactics are not dead but the sites that we are picking to work on are giving less or no value, for example i have commented on more than 20 blog but not got backlink, but when i comment on the blog by MOZ i got a backlink. Same thing happened with directory submission.

there is one thing that is constant and still works ruled the SEO till now.

"highly quality content" "epic content"

invest your time and efforts into content and its promotion, you ll see the boost and moreover its constant.
Give google what it wants.

But 2 things which has not changed as far as the rankings are concerned are

1. Highly Unique and Engaging Content

2. Extremely High quality backlinks done on a consistent basis

IF these are taken care of properly, then ranking is totally achievable..

Google now heavily favors bigger more dynamic websites, it is really too bad as now the bigger websites are now making even more money and the smaller guy is getting squeezed out. That is just the way business goes. It is very simlar to how Walmart comes in and kills all the mom and pop stores, now it is happening on the internet with Google.

It doesnt matter if your website is static or a wordpress site, they both are good. You can rank them. What matters now more than ever is making sure you get links from websites that are have strong pages that are not penalized. You need to get links from Authority pages.

Next you need to make sure that you are using the right anchor text and that you are over optimizing for your primary keywords. You anchor text ratios should show more branded links than primary keyword anchor text.

You need to vary your anchor text also to rank. Your on-page need to be set up correctly using your primary keyword once or twice at most anywhere, your title and h1 tag

Hope that helps those are basics info that should get you started but theres more

I don't think SEO tactics are dead or going to die. Yes. You can say the phenomenon of SEO is changed after updating of google algorithms. You have to make sure you are doing SEO according to the latest updated algorithms, SEO is still working and giving the best results also.

blog comments and web 2.0

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Sure you need to control, adjust, change, adapt after each and every new update your SEO tactics have to be targeted or even partly changed or stopped, but overall if we take link building as one of the SEO strategies, it is still working if it's quality, authority, contextual and relevant to where you are linking to.

And that seems to be still a solid tactic, in the past as well as today, if you look for long lasting results.

However, if you speak of SEO as wild-west-wise just throwing non relevant links to a site, that is still working a bit, but, you are right, is going to die.

Cheers
Dan

The thing that should die in the world of SEO are those dirty tactics used by greedy IM's. There I said it.

hard word will make your site popular, and when you are willing to pay some money, it will become easier

Interesting and thought-provoking comments. Thanks Niche Man, for starting a conversation that helps everyone. I guess I'll contribute by adding a couple of observations of my own.

I won't comment much on automation tools because none of us know with 100% certainty their limitations and their potential going forward. I rely on them every day but am pretty orthodox how I use them. It's too easy to make a remark that derails someone who may be on the right track with innovative tools.

I lean towards endorsing the comment RedShifted made about "highly restricted GSA campaigns for diversification." What I've experienced with ranking has been observed and commented on ad nauseum. Nothing novel about it. It's also in the list RedShifted provided: Width and depth of a site's content. It must be genuinely informative and focused.

Pages with 750+ word articles are pre-requisite for having a good conversation with Google. Mine place an emphasis on LSI. There's a good reason Google hires linguists.

With a brand new site I err on the cautious side and can go to 1,500 words and more for a single article. It may bore people (the trade-off is your bounce rate), but think about the context: Establishing the initial trust in G's eyes, and taking the opportunity to use associative terms (again, think like a linguist) along a wide range of targeted silos. Later I can edit them down to 750-800 words.

This approach has advantages for new sites in highly competitive markets (such as finance and credit). The wide range of site content makes it easier to include long-tails (not trying to be too cliche here) in a tightly themed site architecture. I stall on even building a site until I draft a true silo structure for it. And I'm still surprised at the generally good results just with this.

For some of these sites I don't even think about links. They rise organically, I'm guessing, because of their on-site foundation with content and structure.

Of course, social signals are critically important. Timing is important because G wouldn't expect new sites to have much social signaling. I look at Google and assume it has NSA level technology, so I'm wary of leaving footprints. It's why I stopped using SEO plugins and rely on manually working it into the site. So I wanted to share a few of the fundamentals that work well for my sites in competitive segments. Just a different flavor of SEO, not for everyone.

* edit: EMD's still work (very) well for me. I know it goes against conventional wisdom, but they do

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Offsite SEO is 90% dead
Onsite SEO still 100% alive

Google paying much attention to on-page optimization and the content on the website, keyword variants in the content. Gone are the days where Google used to rank website just by building one landing page, putting all the tags, no matter whether its keyword stuffed or not. Now a days its difficult to share the points on which factor Google ranking the websites.

SEO is never dying whenever search engine is available SEO is always work . Yes we Accept SEO rules are updated day by day and become more difficult.

Meta keywords have absolutely no influence on search results. The alternative is to focus on increasing your percentage of repeat visitors from the search engines. I is something like the present-day stand-in for meta keywords, since links are more accurately thought of as authority signals than as relevancy ones.

SEO hasn't changed. The basic rules are still the same. The only problem is that webmasters have abused every area of it like keywords, tags, content, directory submissions and overdone everything. SEO is not about using placing keywords everywhere. Just implement on page and off page activities as per the SEO rules. No penalty can happen.

if you are good in on page optimization then no one beat you at all.
you must follow the same rule. dont go with spam.

Guest post tactics are not considered by the SEO people and more over it is in the dying state.

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I don't know if this answers your question....
I did article marketing with AMR before 2012 and my sites ranked.Now it doesn't and i don't even try anymore.
Scrapebox commenting used to work.Now don't.

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