Five simple SEO cheats that shouldn't work at all but still seem to do today. These are all taken from backlink analysis and are definitely NOT advocated as something you should do with your website.

1. Aqueous Digital
Top 5 SEO cheats
(that shouldn’t still work but actually do)
October 2015

2. How to cheat Google
• The following slides are all examples of links
that breach Google’s guidelines
• They are all taken from analysis of the backlink
profile of an SEO company in the UK
• They rank highly using these techniques.
• None of them should work, but they do for
this site

3. Hidden links in footer
Yes, really. In 2015 this is still working.
This example is a footer of a transport company and the SEO guy has
hidden a link to his site in white on a white background.
And it’s got heavily optimised anchor text
If you could see it this is where it
would be

4. Pingbacks on old blog posts
The first? There are over 5,000 hidden
pingbacks in the source code

5. Trackbacks
Keeping
good
company…
along with
over 3,000
other
spammers

6. Irrelevant and off topic blog comments
OK so we can’t show
you the actual
comment they made
but it was on this
Teenager girly blog.
And it was nothing to
do with the post.
Not giving them any
more publicity than
necessary…

7. Hijacked page
This page is hiding on the back of a really well know website and if the owner
knew they would be appalled.
Spam content but from a hugely influential website.

8. Moral of the story
• Not all SEO firms are equal
• Don’t believe that if an SEO firm ranks highly
they are necessarily any good
• Google is still just a machine and it can be
fooled