What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is a set of poor practice application out in order to rank higher in Google search results. These SEO techniques are known as black hat as they are against the search engine guidelines laid out by Google. Most commonly used SEO technique involves Keyword Stuffing, Cloaking, Paid Links, Doorway pages, Hidden content & Duplicate Content. Let us discuss each one in detail.
Black Hat SEO Techniques
- Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the packing of multiple keywords in one sentence. This technique refers to pack a page with keywords in an effort to rank higher in search results. Duplicating and presenting of the same words and sentences is done in order to manipulate the Google search bot and get better rankings.
- Duplicate Content
This is one of the methods where content from one page is simply copied by the website owner onto his own website. Stealing others’ goods is a crime, right? The same would apply to content. Google is factually against this method and believes in originally created content.
- Cloaking
Examine as one of the hacker-man techniques, this method includes showing one version of your website to the Google bot and another version to the user.
- Buying Links
This is a negative method where the website owner pays money to another website to give them a link back. There are many digital marketing agencies that sell such paid links, which are often scrappy and low-quality. You should always be better off without such toxic links on your website.
- Link Farming
A link farm is a cluster of websites created with a motive for link building. Site in a link farm refers to a site that is to be ranked higher on search engine results pages (SERP).
- Invisible Text or Links
This SEO technique involves placing white text on a white background. The purpose here is to match the text color to the color of the background. By using it, Site owners hide their keywords from users but make it visible to the Google bot. A similar practice is carried out for links.
- Spamming in Blog Comments
This is a black hat technique that involves adding comments on blog pages, along with a link to their website. This is completely done with the expectation of getting a backlink from that particular site. Google now rejects such links from blogs; the website owners set the links as no-follow by default.
- Incorrect Re-directs
This type of link is a great technique to redirect the user to a proper functioning page if the current page is facing issues. Website owners use 301 redirects in such cases. Experts redirect the links to other site which is generally not legal. In this way, they cheat both the Google bot and users by showing them to a page with a bad URL which they did not intend to visit.
- Overly optimized pages
Too much of anything is bad for you? The same applies to your pages. SEO experts get so busy trying to optimize their pages that they end up doing a tad too much. This involves using a lot of On-page elements like over-optimized anchor text, an extensive number of internal links, keyword-stuffed titles and descriptions, and content.
Why Should One Avoid Black Hat SEO?
This SEO is not a fraud but it breaks the webmaster guidelines regulated by search engines.
Generally a page that uses black hat SEO tactics are de-ranked instantly, with the probability of “domain blacklisting” as one of the measures in domain penalties.
Google penalty will result in lowering your site search or being removed absolutely. This means your website will get less traffic and hardly any customers.
