8 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Should Run Away From Now!
Know what to look out for, and avoid.
If you’re looking for ways to increase the search engine result rankings of your website, there is one tactic you should avoid at all costs – Black Hat SEO. Yes, I know it may be tempting when you’re desperate to increase your search engine result visibility, but believe me, it’s not worth it. Google will penalise you, and it could lead to your site being de-ranked, failing to show up in results for days or weeks, and thousands of lost traffic.
So what are some of the most common Black Hat SEO techniques you should be wary of? See below!
- Keyword stuffing
Putting keywords into your copy that appear more times than what would seem natural, or adding irrelevant keywords to your alt image tags. - Paid links
This one is quite self-explanatory – people have offered to pay you to put one of their links in a piece of content. Whether you see this as advertising, Google still considers it a link scheme – which is not good. Paid link penalties also apply to paid gifts – for example, if someone gives you a gift for purchasing their links. - Invisible/Hidden Text
Essentially this is the same as keyword stuffing, only the user makes these keywords ‘invisible’ – for example, adding white text on a white background. - Doorway Pages
As their name suggests, these pages are created solely for the purpose of ranking for a keyword and then pushing visitors through to the alternative webpage. You’ll notice that the original ‘doorway’ page serves no real purpose, and has little relevant content. - Scraping
Again, this one is pretty self-explanatory and refers to stealing content or data from a competitor’s website for your own page/profit. In some cases, scraping is also used to extract email addresses and then spam those users. - Link Farms
Operating either as a single website, or a group, Link Farms exist for the sole purpose of increasing the popularity of another website. Although these pages may look pretty regular at first glance, you’ll soon notice that there is little content, and instead, a large amount of links hyperlinking to random websites. - Negative SEO
Also known as ‘reporting a competitor,’ this form of Black Hat SEO is somewhat different in that it is usually used maliciously against a competitor, to try and hurt their rankings. A user may do this by falsely reporting you for copyright, hacking into your website and changing things around, or using link farms to point links at your site in an attempt to have you penalised. Nasty isn’t it?
The good news however, is that Google works quite efficiently to detect negative SEO attempts. You can read more here, from seopressor. - Cloaking
A method that presents two different versions of the same website, in an attempt to boost keyword search engine ranking. For example, while a website may display Flash content to viewers, it may, on the other hand, be displaying HTML content to search engines.
Instead of the above techniques, try using White Hat Seo tactics. Unlike their darker counterpart, White Hat includes optimisation strategies and techniques that follow Google’s guidelines and focus on humans as opposed to search engines. If you believe your account has been attacked by malicious Black Hat strategies, or you see other websites following this route, file a webspam report through Google Webmaster Tools.
If you’re looking to implement these strategies, give our Get More Traffic experts a call today on 1300 332 256. We can help increase your conversions and search engine result visibility without the need for any dodgy techniques!