Let’s go back 10 years and imagine the digital life and we see SEO practices as a way to manipulate marketing tactics that were all about cheating Google’s algorithm and ending up on top of the SERPs. But not anymore. We bring you a guide to the Top 10 Black Hat SEO Activities that you need to avoid.
In the old days of Black Hat SEO, these techniques, tricks and tactics may have worked. But this was only until search engines started taking and updating their algorithms to penalize websites practicing Black Hat SEO.
Thankfully, technology has come a long way and Google has updated its regulatory policies to charge the culprits.
Unfortunately, these shady practices are still alive in the SEO world. Although, most website owners don’t really intentionally set out to trick search engines. But it’s very important to not even unintentionally get engaged in such activities because getting away with it is inevitable.
What is Black Hat SEO ?
Black Hat SEO is all the practices, techniques, and tricks performed to trick search engine guidelines, just to get a higher ranking on the search engine results page. These unethical tricks don’t work for the searcher and end up with the website owner getting penalized.
Why should you avoid Black Hat SEO?
On one hand, SEO is all about increasing organic traffic to your website and improving it’s rank on the SERP. If you engage in Black Hat SEO, the opposite can happen.
For starters, it can negatively impact your search ranks and visibility. When a website loses traffic and visibility, its revenue and conversions follow a similar trend.
Secondly, it won’t really drive long-term results. Results derived from Black Hat SEO are rarely sustained. It won’t be a good sight to see the metrics artificially increasing only to fall again after some time.
Lastly, it will end up in a poor user experience. It isn’t rocket science for a user to figure out which website is legit. No matter how good your SEO is, user experience is still a ranking factor.
Top 10 Black Hat SEO Activities to avoid.
1. Buying Links
We all know that having links that connects the user to your website is arguably one of the most important ranking factor.
Sure, buying links has from website’s with good domain authorities has undeniable advantages for the buyer. If its affordable then its easy.
However, buying links is strictly against Google’s guidelines and you should avoid it to stay away from Google’s radar. Bottom line is, backlinks are supposed to be earned and not bought, as it carries the faith of spreading quality content from one website to another.
2. Keyword Stuffing
As self-explanatory as it sounds, keyword stuffing is a Black Hat SEO activity that involves using the same keyword again and again without the content making any sense. This is done to improve organic search results and visibility.
An example of keyword stuffing for digital marketing is,
“Digital Marketing is a good career option. The world is getting digital, hence digital marketing will definitely nice. Digital Marketing has good scope, so digital marketing should be an ideal career choice. Start a career in Digital Marketing.”
This tactic in fact used to work in the 2000s until Google got smart enough with its Panda Algorithm to penalize websites for low content.
3. Cloaking
Cloaking involves showing one piece of content to users and a different piece of content to search engines and Google Bots. This is a clear-cut attempt to rank your page based on content created for search engines and pointing users to somewhere different. This SEO method is considered deceptive because it tricks the search engine in order to get the desired ranks for keywords.
Using cloaking violates Google’s guidelines and you risk getting penalized by Google’s Penguin.
4. Publishing Duplicate Content
This isn’t news that Google ranks only original and unique content. And it is something that is always appreciated. Creating great and non-plagiarized content isn’t easy which makes it one of the top-ranking factors in SEO.
Not that it should ever be done, but the infamous “copy and paste” tactic used to work in school. But if you look at content as a creator or writer, then it probably isn’t a good feeling to see your efforts being used up like that. Google is very particular about duplicate content. It doesn’t like to see the same content making rounds of different websites on the web.
Nowadays, this technique can get noticed within a blink of an eye. You can easily put yourself at risk of getting penalized by Google Panda
5. Blog Commenting Spams
As the name suggests, this Black Hat SEO activity involves commenting on other websites in order to gain a backlink to your website. Linking back to your site in the form of comments is something that is spammy and something that Google doesn’t like to see.
But, to counter this, links gained in this way are ‘nofollow’ links and hence all the efforts of commenting on dozens and dozens of sites all go in vain.
If you are a blogger and you see such spam comments on your website, you can perform a few steps to avoid them. You can either delete them when they appear or, you can mark incoming comments as pending and waiting for approval just to get your own confidence over it.
6. Using Misleading Redirects
A redirect involves sending the user to a different URL than what they actually clicked before. There was nothing wrong with this. It is a method used by many to ensure that your site is well organized and easily accessible to crawlers and users.
Redirects should only be used for the purpose that they were designed. For example, when you change your domain or LinkedIn showing you the full profile of someone, instead of the public version. On the other hand, sneaky redirects should be avoided to increase traffic from a particular page.
7. Invisible Text
This is a notoriously cheap trick. It’s basically putting a list of your keywords in the same color as the background of the page.
You would be surprised but newbies still use this deceiving technique. But what is happening here is hiding the text completely, but that doesn’t apply to texts used in an accordion, in tabs, or is loaded dynamically using JavaScript.
It is highly non-recommended to get into this practice. Search engine crawlers are smart enough to figure out keywords being stuffed.
8. Negative SEO
Some SEOs perform activities in an attempt to reduce the rankings for their competitors. This is exactly going against Google’s guidelines but on behalf of your competitor, rather than yourself.
What literally happens is, one website points out a number of unnatural links to their competitor’s domain in the hope that they get penalized because of it and result in them in falling down the SERP.
The worst part of getting penalized for something that they didn’t do, is not being able to figure out who back stabbed them.
Making it seem like someone else is engaging in Black Hat tactics and falsely claiming that they are and reporting about it to the search engines are two deceiving Black Hat techniques.
9. Gateway Pages
It is an adapted way of redirecting. Creating pages that are made specifically for one search query with content intended to act only as a funnel to another page is called Gateway pages.
The pages are solely ranked for search queries rather than to meet the user’s needs.
In March 2015, Google specifically launched a new Doorway Page penalty algorithm particularly for this type of technique.
Think about why you decided to enter the web in the first place. You must create content for humans, not for search engines.
10. Abusing Structured Data
Structured Data is also known as rich snippets and schema. This is a code added to a web page to tell search engines what crisp content to display on the web pages.
Black Hat SEO involves providing inaccurate information in structured data to fool search engines and users. For example, many marketers give themselves fake reviews and five star ratings to land them up on the SERP.
Final Note
This was our detailed analysis for the Top 10 Black Hat SEO Activities. Black hat SEO may sound like a shortcut to improving your rankings and gaining more visibility. Black Hat practices can hurt your SEO before they can help.
It won’t be late before you get penalized for the same. Users and search engines appreciate only unique and original content and we cannot stress this enough. We hope that you avoid these 10 Black Hat SEO Activities to the greatest extent.
So think twice before engaging in Black Hat SEO activities because gaming Google is more difficult than you’d think.
Also Read – All you need to know about SEO Footprints
Also Read – 8 Reasons why your site is not ranked on Google
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