SEO with its complicated world would necessitate you to have a good knowledge about its important aspects including the terminology “black hat SEO”. You have may heard about black hat SEO but you don’t have any idea about it. Well, to be brief, black hat SEO is term used to refer the utilizing of aggressive yet irrelevant SEO techniques that focus only on the search engine and not on the human users and usually does not obey the Webmasters Guidelines. Black hat SEO comes into a good number of types, some includes keyword stuffing, the use of invisible texts, doorway pages, adding irrelevant keywords to the page content and page swapping.
Basically, the use of black hat seo practices are common to incompetent SEO firms and those who are seeking for a speedy return on their financial investments for their websites, rather than that of a long term investment. Practically, black hat SEO could result into extreme cases like your site being banned to appear in the results of the search engine.
As the number of individuals who demand for highly relevant and quick online information increases, Google, being the pioneering search engine, continues to change and update their searching algorithm constantly. This will help them give their user a more relevant and efficient search results. Practically, many marketers are employing SEO campaign for their website to obtain a good ranking on search engines especially in Google. However, you should understand that the most successful SEO services are those that are achieved with by using right and lawful ways. Meaning, the use of illegal and unethical “black hat” practices is a big no if you want to achieve your SEO goals.
When having your SEO campaign, below is a list of the most common black hat practices that you must avoid.
CLOAKING
Cloaking is indubitably one of the most common black hat techniques used by some online marketers these days. Cloaking is the technique that tend to deceive the search engine by showing different content to Google and take your websites users to a different page than where they though they must be going on after being able to click the search engine link. Example, your web code makes Google think that you are directing a user to a fashion blog when in fact your website offers information about latest gadgets or electronics. Practically, Google is not that dumb, as it uses its search algorithms to locate such kinds of activities, and if your website is detected, then it will be subjected to get punished. The penalty may include the lowering of your ranking in search results, or what is worse is that it will be totally banned in Google.
LINK EXCHANGES
This kind of technique is relatively irrelevant these days. Link Exchanging is pretty much as it sounds, agreeing between sites to link from one to another and getting a similar link back – these can also form massive link networks which are also “black hat”. It doesn’t matter whether you triangulate or anything like that, link exchanges are wrong in the eyes of search engines.
Today, Google had already changed their algorithm that discourages such activity – penalties are regularly applied for such activity. Now, websites must learn to focus on natural link building rather than that of link exchanges.
ARTICLE SPINNING
Article spinning has become very popular in the recent years. Mainly, article spinning is the use of submitting an article online, and then using software to spin the articles. Most often, these articles are solely created for the search engine and not for the humans because most of the time they are not readable. “Spinning” is simply the term used to mean altering the layout of the content, order of the content and sometimes just the title. It’s clear to see you are “cheating” the system and Google is not only likely not to rank such articles but also hand out penalties potentially for this.
DUPLICATE CONTENT
Copying content from another site is one of the worst black hat techniques one can ever use. Duplicate copy issues can also come from within your own website. If you truly need to have more than one copy of content (perhaps you’ve a number of blogs for a network of businesses and you share an article over two blogs) you can use a canonical tag to point to the one you class as original, this means the non-original won’t rank in search usually but you won’t be penalized for duplication.
Put simply, Search engines prefer unique content.
SPAM COMMENTS
Spam commenting is a kind of black hat technique that uses various tools to spam comment a post and try to add backlinks. In most cases you see this done manually and it’s easy to spot, but some big players have used mechanical tools and lets just say google wasn’t too happy. The other thing to remember is that comment links tend to be ‘nofollow’ and as such carry zero weight in search ranking, spam comment wastes your time and resources but it also makes your brand look really bad.
This is a guest post by @ChooseRethink, edited by SEOAndy.
Original SEO Content by SEOAndy @ 5 Extremely Risky Black Hat SEO Practices That You Should Avoid
