SEO tactics you tried that didn't help?

There are million tips and advice about SEO (black/white). Much less, but still plenty of success stories.

But others are shy to talk about their unsuccessful trials and errors, however, it is way more interesting. It sounds more genuine and honest.

You learn from mistakes.

You also don't really need to keep it a secret, because it is not something that works. It's just a story when you spent time and energy, and learnt it the hard way.

Tell what SEO tactics you tried that didn't work/help your goal. Even if that happened relatively long time ago.

To start, I personally ain't very experienced SEO person, but I have a thing that I spent time that didn't return on resources & time spent: Rich Schema data (JSON-LD) - for recipes, for articles, for anything really. I added it rigorously among my sites to later find that it doesn't influence anything at all. Google adviced for it, other experts adviced adding it, but in reality, after my tests I found that it doesn't bring as much as you spend resources to add it, especially because I have my sites done manually (statically generated). I don't say that it won't work for you. As the topic says - it didn't work for me.

There are several factors that can cause a strategy to fail. The quality of the domain (old, new, Exact Match Domain , Parasite ?), the quality of the content (AI or human-generated content)? Does the page truly address the search intent? What page templates are your competitors using?

what exactly did you expect from JSON-LD? I mean that is just a way to present google crawlers the structure of a part of your website. It does not bring traffic, it does not help you rank up. That's from my knowledge (might be wrong. entered SEO world about 6 months ago so I'm still a newbie)

I did not actually try this, but I am quite sure that it wont bring that good into your website, is to hammer many spam links which are obvious automated to your website. This tactic might have been good 10 years ago, but now google is much smarter.

From my experience, I started building my link profile with tiered backlinks from a gig I found online, and that made me at least be present on results page when people trying to search for my brand. but that was it. nothing more than that. To rank, you need quality over quantity. (+many other factors)

Schema markup is nothing but data presentation. For example, you present data in a pie chart instead of a table. It's not a productivity tool. It makes crawling easy for search engines so that they can directly show a pie chart instead of generating a pie chart using the data from a table. You are saving time and resources of Google crawlers hoping that they may reward you. They don't promise any rewards, so there is no point in being disappointed.

I’ve also run into a few tactics that looked great on paper but delivered almost nothing in practice. One of them was aggressively updating old posts just for the sake of freshness, and most of those edits barely moved the needle. What helped more was focusing on actual content gaps instead of mechanical updates.

Most SEO “tactics” like spammy links, mass schema markup, chasing every GSC keyword, social traffic, or AI content don’t move rankings only real authority, relevance, and topical depth actually work.

topical depth actually work.

Click to expand...

how Google "knows" its "depth" or not "depth"? Is Google an expert in every topic in this world and knows everything to judge this?

Randomly acquiring links even from less authoritative websites, PBNs, link wheel which I felt gained less outcome in long run. The best outcome which I received in last 5 to 6 years is improving the website content, UI and creating own website authority. This has naturally led to improved website rankings.

I wasted the most time on chasing random backlinks - tons of effort, almost zero results.

SEO tactics that wasted my time: over optimizing schema, low demand blog posts, chasing high competition keywords, cheap guest posts, keyword stuffing, ignoring search intent, rewriting top articles, thin category pages, over fixing technical issues, and relying only on Google.