What looks like optimization and actually hurts

Most of the things in the list below are not scams. They are practices that worked once, were widely recommended, and stayed in circulation long after they stopped helping. A few actually do harm.

Repeating the keyword

The practice: you pick the phrase you want to win and sprinkle it through the text, in headings, in the first paragraph, at a certain density.

Measured, in a paper presented at the KDD conference in 2024 by researchers from Princeton and three other institutions, on Perplexity, a real engine: texts with keyword repetition scored 21.9 on visibility, compared with 24.1 for the unmodified texts. That is, below the level of doing nothing at all.

The ratings and reviews you give yourself

Many site themes offer a box with stars and an average rating, marked up in the code as structured data, so that it appears with stars in Google results. The temptation is obvious.

Google's guidelines for raters are explicit about their value:

“Reviews” by the product manufacturer (“Our product is great!”) or “reviews” from an influencer who is paid to promote the product are not as trustworthy due to the conflict of interest.

Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines, version of 11 September 2025, section on trust

The final clause is the one that matters: it is not that the rating is necessarily false, but that nobody can take it seriously when it comes from the interested party.

Redirecting all errors to the home page

It is often recommended and sounds clean: no error pages on the site. In reality it produces dozens or hundreds of URLs that claim to be something they are not. Google calls this a soft 404 and treats it as such.

A page that no longer exists must say clearly that it no longer exists. We covered this in chapter 4, including the case where we deliberately left an error in place.

Texts written for the engine, not for people

They can be recognized by a few signs: paragraphs that repeat in other words what they just said, three-paragraph introductions before any information, sentences that contain the target phrase in unnatural forms, of the type “insurance services Alba Iulia cheap”.

The practical problem is not that Google penalizes them, but that people abandon them. And reader behavior is, in the end, what gets measured.

Automatically generated content left as is

Google does not forbid text written with the help of a language model. The official position is that the problem is not how the text was produced, but whether it is useful and original. What gets penalized is the mass production of content without added value, regardless of method.

In practice, text that is generated and published untouched has three visible defects: it contains no information that only you have, it gets precise local details wrong, and it resembles the competition's, because it was produced from the same sources.

Visual editing tools, used carelessly

Buying links

The practice of paying other sites to link to yours. It is the only one in this chapter that explicitly breaks Google's rules and for which there are direct sanctions.

It is easy to recognize in offers: a guaranteed number of links per month, a price per link, results promised within a fixed deadline. Real authority is not bought by the piece.

Faking the update date

The practice of changing an article's date without changing the article, so that it looks fresh. It is easy to detect, because the engine compares the content, not just the date, and it undermines exactly the signal it is trying to exploit.

Real updating, on the other hand, is one of the best investments: a good article revised every year, with new figures and with what has changed, consistently produces more than a new article on the same subject.