Dead SEO Tactics, Dug Up and Resold as "AI Hacks", FFS

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 themI 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 them01:39 — The keywords meta tag02:31 — Hidden text and keyword stuffing03:02 — Keyword density: stuffing with a spreadsheet03:28 — Exact match domains04:14 — Doorway pages and their brand-new AI face05:32 — Spun and mass-produced content06:23 — Submitting to 5,000 search engines07:45 — Three questions that spot the next one09:17 — Homework: check your site for corpses10:16 — The industry's memory is short on purposeLinks mentioned:Non-Wanky SEO Courses (the On-Page SEO Toolkit is now free): https://nonwankyseo.comGoogle: "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-tagGoogle's spam policies (hidden text, keyword stuffing, doorway abuse, scaled content abuse): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policiesThe 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.socialMentioned in this episode:ICN Network