SEO is one of the most powerful marketing channels for businesses. With over 3.5 billion searches per day, businesses need to constantly update their content to boost their rankings.
Firstly, whenever you decide which SEO strategies to adopt, always remember that it's best to adopt a holistic, relationship-building optimization approach. Your main aim should be to develop content that is fit for actual users who read your content and not search engines.
But, in order to climb up the search engine rankings quickly, many companies tend to use black hat SEO techniques, knowingly or unknowingly.
Basically, black hat SEO refers to a set of disapproved and deceptive practices that website owners use to trick search engine algorithms. These are manipulative techniques violate the search engine’s terms of service to get their site listed. While, temporarily, this might get a lot of traffic to your page, but, as soon as the search engine page’s algorithms are updated, you might get penalized for using these techniques.
So, if not black hat SEO strategies then what? To ace this game, you use the best SEO software available in the market. But, don't expect to get instant results. It takes time for any SEO strategy to get the desired results.
To help you develop better strategies and track your metrics, you can also use tools like SEO PowerSuite and Advanced Web Ranking which are all-inclusive SEO based software that will help you optimize your site better.
These software will help you grow your rankings organically and stay away from black hat SEO strategies. And if you resort to black hat SEO strategies your content will obviously suffer. Low-quality content adds no value to your page at all. And even if any user visits your page, the thin and poorly structured content will prevent them from coming back ever again.
So, resorting to black hat SEO will lead to all of these consequences. Many a time, it might happen unknowingly. But, they can bring in serious consequences. So, here are a few black hat SEO techniques that you should avoid at any cost:
1. Cloaking
Cloaking means displaying two different sets of information for the same website. The information that is displayed to the user is different than the information that is presented to the search engine crawlers. It is an illegal practice and it can result in search engines banning you permanently from their index.
Cloaking is done to increase the rankings on the SERP and get more traffic. So, how is cloaking implemented?
- By inserting keywords into the page only when the user-agent requests the page and not displaying it to the human visitors
- Showing the Flash page to users and the HTML text page to the search engines
Also, whenever a user requests for a page, the content is delivered based on the user-agent HTTP header. As the bot’s IP can change, those who indulge in black hat SEO have an updated list of IP addresses.
As a result, it becomes difficult for human visitors to find an answer to their query. Now, when Google realizes that the content is different, it immediately bans the page.
2. Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the oldest SEO trick. When the content is written for the search engine purposes and not for human readers, the article becomes spammy and Google ultimately de-indexes the website.
So, what practices can be labelled as keyword stuffing?
- Repeating the same keyword over and over again
- Trying to invisibly use the keywords
If you want to earn higher rankings and provide quality content that has the ability to bring back customers, you should avoid keyword stuffing altogether.
So, how do you include keywords in your article so that it is not penalized?
Make sure that your content has at least 350 words so that the search engine crawlers know that the article does have some meaningful information. You can also use secondary keywords, long tail keywords and synonyms of the primary keyword in the article.
So, instead of stuffing the article with keywords, you should make different content pages for different keywords. And ideally chose, one keyword per page. So, whenever a user searches using a particular keyword, your page would rank higher.
3. Spamming the comments section
Comments are supposed to have relevant and engaging content. When you comment on other pages with unrelated information, Google considers it as spamming.
Instead, when you comment on other blogs with useless and unrelated information, you don't get any benefit. Spamming in the comment section has a negative impact on the user experience. This, in turn, reduces your website traffic.
So, when you try commenting on various blogs so that they link back to your page, Google perceives it as black hat search engine optimization. Moreover, comment spamming reduces the overall website quality, affects your search engine rankings and negatively impacts the user experience.
4. Using exact match anchor text
The words in the anchor text have a direct impact on the search engine rankings of the website. The anchor text usually is the clickable text in the hyperlink. So, if your anchor text has the same highlighted keywords as the targeted keyword in the web page, it results in exact-match anchor text and that is considered a black-hat SEO technique.
Many firms while optimizing their anchor text make this mistake and repeat the same keyword in their anchor text as well. So, unknowingly, you are responsible for Google penalizing your page. So, you need to be extra careful while optimizing the keywords.
While optimizing your website for search engines, you should make sure that the keywords in the anchor text and your targeted keywords link should not be more than 5%, otherwise, it might result in Google blacklisting your site.
Endnote:
Black hat SEO might result in an increased traffic inflow to your website for the time being, but, Google is quick to detect these practices. It can get your website banned from Google and drastically reduce your traffic and rankings.
Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms and they can detect even the shadiest and deceptive practices. Because, after all, it's all about the user experience. So, anything that is not user-friendly is also bad for SEO purposes. Focus on providing the best content, and it will automatically increase your website’s rankings.
So if you trying to build a long-lasting business, you should avoid black hat SEO tactics at all costs.