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Posted by Maulik Patel
December 30, 2016
Today, most of the people involved in Search Engine Marketing will be knowing that there are two strategies/tactics to perform SEO: White hat and Black hat.
White hat SEOs completely follow the rules and policies of search engines and focus on human audiences instead of search engines. This technique includes engaging with in-depth keyword research to rank in SERPS, promoting high-value content, and promoting the websites using the methods that follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Black hat SEOs use aggressive SEO strategies which are focused on search engines and not the users and usually don’t follow the search engine guidelines. Often, they are afraid that doing high-quality work to boost the search engine rankings will take too much time, so they often go with shortcuts that aren’t exactly laid out in Google’s best practices.
Fortunately, today the online world has a flexible workspace, where prospective clients can find useful, valuable content to help them make informed decisions about their future choice of work-space. SEO is an ongoing process where you require to make changes as the search engines constantly update the existing or roll out new algorithms every time in order to make the online user experience as positive as possible
However, for business owners, keeping up with the changing SEO activities has become a tough challenge. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to ensure the very best, most unique, and most relevant online experiences for visitors.
Search engine algorithms are just like a bottle of milk, they are designed to make the good content (the cream) rise to the top, and the less preferential content sink to the bottom. It is important to stay proactive with the search engine alterations as much as possible or find out a reputed consultant or agency to help you do so.
However, there are Black Hat SEO techniques that may harm your website’s ranking in the SERPs and as you move towards more of such SEO tactics, there are some which may also affect your website’s traffic and kill your SEO campaign. And if your website relies heavily on organic traffic, these black hat SEO techniques can put you down for good.
With that said, here are 3 black hat SEO techniques that you should avoid:
Publishing content that doesn’t provide real value to the users is the ground for Google’s Panda penalties. So, when it comes to content, here’s what you should avoid:
Because producing valuable, high-quality content takes a lot of time and effort, some people take the content from other websites and reuse/repurpose it to publish it on their websites. If you think that you can produce great content without the pain of creating the original content on your own. Not actually…… Google doesn’t like to see the same content spread across multiple websites and they are very particular about duplicate content. To republish an article on your website, you should have the permission of the original author, or you’ll run the risk of a Google penalty.
This is another common aspect for people who’re new to the SEO world. Earlier, people thought that the more they optimize a page, the better their page will rank, and included ten H1 tags and repeated the keywords to rank over and over again. This was a common practice somewhere in 2000 and this actually worked.
But today, Google is loving content that provides real value to searchers. This clearly means over-optimizing is out and the emphasis on giving the most comprehensive answer to a user’s search queries is absolutely in.
If you think that by hiding links or text, you can include lots of links back to your site without the search engine even knowing about it. You’re mistaken! Google bots are smart enough and easily come to know if your website has any hidden links or text. The fact is that if you’re having hidden links, Google crawlers can see a different website than your visitors. This might turn out to be one of the easiest ways to get penalized and see a drop in your rankings.
If one website offers to link to another, they might think that it’s a good idea to link back to each other in order to get a bit of link juice in return.
But this concept of reciprocal links makes sense only if there’s a purpose for both websites to link to each other. But if the entire purpose of this practice is “link juice,” you’ll be running the risk of getting penalized.
If we talk about Google, the most crucial ranking factor is the quality and quantity of links backing a website. So, it’s obvious thing that buying links from high domain authority websites is the quick and easy way to get backlinks without putting in much effort.
But this is purely against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. And buying such links will easily get you on Google’s bad side and receive a manual or automatic penalty. There are very less chances that you win against Google in this game because Google easily tracks the links which are natural with the ones which are purchased.
Now this is simply an understandable thing, nobody would like to get their website’s links back from malicious websites. Unfortunately, there are many hackers, spammers, and black hat SEOs out there who embrace the dark side and often try to damage another site by linking to it from a site that is spammy or even un-indexed.
If Google thinks that a particular site deems spammy links to your site, it can eventually hurt your search ranking. If you notice some malicious links from precarious websites coming to your website, or you find that there are suspicious websites linking to your website, you can use the Google Search Console Disavow Tool which will tell Google to ignore the link.
Although having an unsecured website will not technically get you any of the Google penalties, but this could result in losing your website’s valuable rankings.
If Google finds out that your website is injected or attacked with some malicious code, they can block your website for the people using their search engine.
Not only will this cause your website to drop in the rankings, but you might also lose the trust of the visitors who visits your site from organic search.
While it’s true that Google Analytics would send you a notification that your site has been hacked, it still could mean a real penalty for your website in search results if Google knows your site contains malicious code.
When it comes to black hat SEO, there are a lot of things that matter. Producing high-quality content and following Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are the two most important factors. Further, have enough patience and practice White hat SEO strategies, don’t be in a rush. It will really pay off in the long run.
Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com
