Outdated SEO Practices to Avoid in 2025

How bad exactly are outdated SEO practices? 

Well, let’s start with an imaginary scenario that will allow us to draw a great parallel. 

Imagine having a medical condition and deciding to ask for treatment from a medieval doctor. They don’t even have to be a bad one; they could be the biggest medical minds of their time and have all the knowledge of their era, alongside all the most effective practices. How comfortable would you be with this arrangement? 

Probably not too much.

Why?

Well, because knowledge gets outdated.

Now, while the medical field has advanced over these centuries, in some fields, like digital marketing, the history is a lot shorter, and the advancement is much faster.

The entire field is barely two decades old, and cutting-edge techniques from just a few years ago could now be completely outdated. Not only will they not give you the desired effect, but they might also even hurt you since some of these techniques were so abused (while the were still effective) that search engines now treat them as exploits.

Still, what are these bad SEO techniques, how do you recognize them, and why do you have to avoid them so much?

Well, let’s find out!

Keyword research is the key to applying proper SEO techniques. The bottom line is that you do a quick research on the keywords that your audience is using the most and then carefully insert them into your content. 

In the past, however, people abused keywords by stuffing as many of them as they could in the text. This was cut down in some previous algorithm updates (in 2011, 2012, and 2013). After these updates, Google started paying more attention to things like keyword density and context around the keyword.

Today, you’re better off focusing on improving your keyword density and picking just a few keywords you’ll fit as organically as possible. Since you’re trying to qualify for a gain in authority in this one field (your own industry), you can use some (general) keywords known as indicators of knowledge. These indicators are also called LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords.

Ironically enough, and to better illustrate how this works, in an article like this one (a digital marketing and SEO-based article), the abbreviation LSI would be an actual LSI. This sort of meta-coincidence can help illustrate the point further.

This way, the algorithm can develop a better understanding of what you’re writing about.

At the same time, we live in an era of NLP and AI, which means that algorithms can understand text on almost human levels. This is why natural keyword integration and high-quality content. 

As for the ideal keyword density, the rule of thumb is that your main keyword shouldn’t be more than 1-2% of the text. Even better, you should use the main keyword 3-5 times in an average-sized text (1,500 to 2,500 words) and secondary keywords 1-3 times.

Also, if context allows it, you shouldn’t keep KWs closer than 100 words apart.

Buying links sounds like a shortcut, but it’s a shortcut that will take you to the wrong place. After all, when you board the wrong train, every station you reach is the wrong one. 

Make no mistake: buying links can have a positive SEO impact, but only in the short run. All you have to do is find a site and a page with decent enough content and pay to insert a link to your site there.

First of all, this happens in violation of search engine guidelines and if you’re discovered (which is almost certain with the current sophisticated state of the algorithm). This means that you’re potentially exposing yourself to a lot of risks (of penalties), and the end result will likely be of lower quality by default. 

To understand why buying links is bad, compare it to an alternative, the so-called link-earning. This works pretty simply: you create quality content, and people will allow you to post a link there.

It’s also important to distinguish between writing a sponsored article and paying a partner to publish it.

Now, you may assume that this is one of the worst search engine methods because it costs too much, but, in reality, the cost is the least of your concerns. The real problem lies in the quality of the text.

You’re worried about the cost of a bought link because you never paused for a moment to calculate how much you would have to pay to make a quality blog post. You’re either paying in hours (and an average post takes at least four hours to write), or you’re paying in words, and a skilled SEO writer won’t be cheap.

You must also pay for the editor (probably even the link builder), etc. You’re not really saving money.

The next thing you need to be very careful of is the so-called over-optimizing. 

Why is overoptimizing bad?

Well, because the term has a positive connotation, it sounds far more innocent than it really is. What optimization is tweaking your content so that it’s a bit more appealing to the algorithm? Overoptimizing is conscientiously engaging in the process of heavy manipulation of your content to present your posts as much better than they really are.

The whole point of SEO-optimized content creation is to create meaningful and quality content around a few keywords; however, if you try too much, the quality of your content will suffer. 

Why?

Well, just think about it. Previously, we’ve talked about perfect keyword density and how you should have a keyword every 100 or so words. Well, an optimizer will take this literally and try to use a keyword every 100 words, regardless of whether the content allows it. They’ll also zealously target this range of 100 words, regardless of whether they’re overstuffing content or reducing its flow and readability in the process.

As a result, you’ll often get penalized by search engines, but you’ll also reduce the overall user experience. Now, with the increased use of AI in modern SEO, search engines are even more suspicious of “perfect” SEO optimization in content. No human can mold every text to have all the perfect SEO metrics, optimal keyword density, and everything in between.

Therefore, approaching SEO from a purely technical standpoint is one of the outdated SEO practices that you should abandon for the sake of better results. 

This doesn’t mean that all optimization is bad. Just go for natural keyword integration, use proper heading tags, make your URL structure clean, and focus on creating decent meta-data. This is something that you can never go wrong with.

Content marketing is tricky and in the past, the majority of people approached link building with the stance that they have to grab as much territory as they possibly can. In reality, this did have some effect, but this is one of the most clearly outdated SEO practices, which will take a lot of work and not deliver equivalent results.

Link-builders of the past used to produce incredible quantities of low-quality content. 

Quality is incredibly important because it positively affects every single SEO metric. You get more engagement, better conversion rates, more traffic, more shares, longer page retention duration, more pages per visit, and more return visitors. All of this comes from your audience recognizing your quality. Needless to say, this is something that a bad page will never generate.

Even if you trick someone into visiting your pages, they’ll leave immediately (thus increasing your bounce rate), never return again, and hardly ever notice your content.

At the same time, you can’t neglect quantity, either. Even the best piece of content will only give you limited results. The truth is that you need both quantity and quality to make the impact you want. 

This puts you in an awkward spot: You have to produce a lot of content (preferably human-written content) and find enough relevant, high-DA sites to publish it on. All of this takes time and effort.

At the same time, you cannot ignore your own content marketing strategy. You have a blog that you want to maintain and link toward. This means regularly posting optimized, high-quality content that you hope will generate backlinks on its own. 

The best approach is to hire a good SEO strategist and editor and give them the authority to form a great content marketing team. 

Google is updating at an astounding pace, and today, in the era of AI, it’s even picking up the pace. This means that there are more algorithm updates than ever before and that there are more major updates at a greater rate. 

This is why you either have to take this very seriously or find an experienced team that’s actually capable of keeping up with it all. Neither of the two is easy, but they’re not impossible either.

The bottom line is that you stay away from these outdated SEO practices and always keep up with the new methods in the field.