SEO is probably the most important aspect of ranking your website or content on the internet. No matter how efficient a digital marketing campaign is, most things fall flat without SEO. This is why companies and marketing agencies rely heavily on SEO based techniques whiles others opt for Black hat SEO techniques.
There are multiple types of SEO, including black hat SEO. Although it is not a preferred choice for companies, they are widely used for quick results. In this blog, we will discuss black hat SEO in detail. So, let’s dive right into the nitty-gritty details without further ado.
What is Black Hat SEO?
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Black hat SEO techniques are utilized to rank a website in violation of search engine standards. Black hat SEO strategies are those that aim to influence search engine ranking in order to improve a site’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs).
From Google to Bing, search engines clearly indicate their terms of service prohibit which sorts of activities. The consequences of breaking their rules are likewise clearly laid out in their policies. Using black hat SEO strategies may result in your official website being penalized (either automatically through algorithms or manually), which will result in lower search engine ranking spots and, most probably, a decrease in organic search traffic.
What are the Penalties of Black Hat SEO Techniques?
Despite the fact that black hat SEO is not completely illegal, it does violate the webmaster regulations set out by the search engines. Websites that seem to be using black hat SEO practices are often de-ranked immediately, with the possibility of “domain blacklisting” as being one of the steps in website penalties.
Additionally, Google penalties will decrease the search engine results or the complete removal from the search rankings. This implies that the website will get fewer visitors and receive fewer customers. It is recommended to avoid engaging in black hat SEO, despite certain companies providing Google penalty recovery services.
Some Famous Black Hat Techniques
Here are some of the most common ones in the sea of black hat SEO techniques.
1. Keyword Stuffing
Repeating the primary target keyword(s) unnecessarily won’t assist your website in ranking. Keyword stuffing, as it’s called, will very probably result in the reverse.
Black hat SEOs may occasionally try to influence a site’s performance by placing keywords excessively throughout a page. Keyword stuffing typically happens in odd chunks that lie beyond the primary material or inside paragraphs that simply don’t make any sense whatsoever when you try to understand them.
2. Duplicate Content
This is probably one of the worst black hat SEO techniques one can indulge in. Duplicating content for your own website and blogs won’t get you anywhere. Google and other search engines strictly advise against duplicating content and promoting original work.
Simply copying and pasting content might seem lucrative, time-saving, and pocket-friendly, but this practice will only harm your internet presence when you consider things in the long run. If you are taking some information from another blog or article, it is advised to give the due credit.
3. Cloaking
Cloaking is a strategy that includes presenting alternate material or URLs to website visitors and some other content to search engines, resulting in a distinctly different impression on each platform. In layman’s terms, this strategy entails presenting one side of your website to the Google bot while providing a different form to the end-user or visitor.
In this case, there is a clear effort to rank a website based on material written specifically for search engines while redirecting readers to another website. This is a misleading approach that violates search engine criteria. Therefore it should be avoided.
4. Hidden Text
Hidden text is content that is in the exact color as the backdrop, and it is located off the display or behind a picture, or it is purposely disguised from visitors by using CSS to conceal it from them. It may also be text that has 0 text size. Numerous marketers would supply large listings of keywords that they intended their material to rank for in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is misleading, yet it is occasionally done to pack keywords into the text.
However, we are discussing an obvious effort to conceal text altogether, which does not extend to content that is included inside an interface, within tabs, or that is displayed periodically via JavaScript. Embedding hidden text to your WebPages is not something anyone should advocate, and we strongly discourage it. Search engine bots have become significantly more intelligent in recent years, and they recognize when you’re attempting to pack in keywords.
5. Excessive Redirects
It doesn’t matter if you’re redirecting an existing page to a different Url or planning for a website transition; redirects are a typical aspect of search engine optimization practice. The fact that this is the recommended approach to ensuring that your site is properly structured and readily available by visitors and search engine bots is not a problem.
Conversely, deceptive redirects, which are related to cloaking, are used by black hat SEOs to trick search results and show material that is dissimilar from how a visitor sees on a website. It is common for search engines to crawl the source page while consumers are sent to a new URL. Shady redirections are particularly listed as a black hat technique that breaches Google’s Website Standards in its Webmaster Guidelines.
Wrapping Up!
The usage of black hat tactics is very dangerous since they are almost always discovered eventually. As a result, a website may be suspended or punished. Being blacklisted is very unusual since it entails the complete and permanent elimination of a specific website from the search engine results pages (SERPs). Penalization is a considerably more prevalent effect of paying for bad SEO, and it entails decreasing a website’s ranking on search engines like Google.
Now that you know the limitations of black hat SEO techniques and what consequences one might face by employing them, it’s all up to you now.
