What do you need to know about black hat SEO?

Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices that violate the search engine guidelines to increase a site or page’s rank in search results. The term Black hat originates from western movies to differentiate. good guys who wore white hats. This term is now also used for computer hackers, virus creators, and people who do unethical activities with computers. If you are new to SEO, it is important that you should know what are black hat SEO practices are. It is because you may unwittingly apply these practices to your site which may cause devastating results for your site like banning it from google or other search engines.

8 Black hat SEO strategies to avoid

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is repeating your page’s target keyword excessively across the page. It may occur in random blocks that sit outside of the main content or within paragraphs that make no sense when someone read them aloud. Here is an example of keyword stuffing. The target keyword here is custom software. “We are in the business of selling custom software. Custom software is what we sell. If you are thinking of getting custom software get in touch with custom software consultants.” Note the repetition of the target keyword and think about the users’ annoyance when they read it.

Cloaking

Cloaking involves showing one piece of content to users and a different version of it to search engines. Websites practicing black hat SEO do this in order to rank for a variety of terms. But the content they serve to users is completely irrelevant to the terms that they serve to rank for. It is essential that your website should have a mobile version and a desktop version but both versions must present the same content. In simple words, changing the content of a website regardless of how many versions of it has completely unacceptable according to the guidelines of search engines. Another legal change is the language of the website. A website may publish in multiple languages. But the condition is the same that is no change in the content of the site.

Sneaky Redirects

A redirect means sending someone to a different URL than the one first clicked. Black hat SEO redirects involve sending search engine crawlers to one page and the rest of the other users to another page. One example of black hat SEO is redirecting an authoritative page with lots of backlinks to another irrelevant page. It is because 301 redirect transfers the majority of a page authority to another.

People practicing black hat SEO actually misuse the purpose of redirecting. The redirection process was created for a few special occasions. For example, if someone changes his domain name. Another situation is if someone needs to consolidate two pieces of content. It is also acceptable to use JavaScript to redirect users on some special occasions.  

Low-Quality Content

The low-quality content refers to content that offers no value to searchers. Before 2011, some people used to copy well-written content from a site and post it on their site, and they achieved a high ranking in search results. But after 2011, google became much more clever and it can now identify duplicate and low-quality content. Posting duplicate content in a website may result in penalizing

Another black hat SEO technique is adding invisible keywords to a content. It is done by making the keywords and the page’s background the same. What happens because of this is the search engine bot can see those keywords and rank the page but the page does not contains any content associated with the keywords. As a result, when the users click the search result and read the content they don’t get the content they expected for.

Paid Links

Google strictly prohibits buying or selling links. Regarding paid links, google stated that any links intended to manipulate a site ranking in google search results would be considered a link scheme, and this is a strict violation of google’s webmaster guidelines. How to avoid involving in a link scheme clique? Simply you should not pay any site to link to your content. Buying or selling links is a bad SEO practice because google asks users to report instances of such practice. And, if it found any site involved in buying or selling links, will penalize both buyers and sellers.

Blog comment spam

This black hat SEO technique involves adding a link to your website in the blog comment section of an article. This is not an effective technique now because of google’s recent update that discounts any link in the blog comment section. Many authoritative sites also make no-follow by default for links in the blog comment section. This means search engines like google do not follow those links nor pass any link authority. Despite this development, some people still offer blog comment services on a freelancing websites like Fiberer. Blog commenting with links to your website is a spammy way of getting links which is highly discouraged.

Link farms

Link farms is a website or a collection of websites that are developed solely for link building purposes. Each website or websites link out to a site that want to rank higher in search result. Search engine like google give priority to site when it comes to ranking the site that has the high number of links pointed to the site. Black hat SEO practicing people use link farms to inflate the number of backlinks to their site. Link farms have low quality content and lots of links. These links contain keywords that the site want to rank for in anchor text. Utilizing link farms for link building purpose should be aboided because google can identify link farms. Instead, one should follow white hat SEO practice like writing amazing content so that he can gets backlinks naturally.

Private blog network

A private blog network is a group of authorative websites that are exclusively use for link building purpose. All these websites link to a main site that they want to see the site gets high ranking in search result but they don’t link to each other. To build a private blog network, black hat SEOs buy expired domain that have authority and write similar content but link to their main site that they want to rank for. But the problem with PBN is google can detect private blog network and can penalize a site that use PBN for link building purpose.

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