Every SEO expert comes across the Black Hat SEO Techniques at least once in their lives. Some avoid them, while some find a way to improve their SEO through them. Let me take you through these black hat SEO techniques and what it contains in the box for you in the long run.
White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO are two famous terms we all have heard during the learning process of optimization. Anyway, ‘black hat’ in the internet world has always been used to target the mischief-makers: hackers, virus programmers, and those who perform illegal tasks online. White Hat SEO is just the opposite. It is one that is clear of all unethical disputes, following the most legal and honest ways.
So let us see what does black hat has to do when it comes to SEO.
WHAT IS BLACK HAT SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) includes all the methods and factors related to increasing the website’s rank that is determined by the Search Engines.
Black Hat SEO are those unethical means of site optimization to increase one’s PageRank by violating the rules set by the Search Engines. Even if they do work to improve the page’s SEO, these techniques are hi disapproved. If the webmaster is caught by the Search Engines using these methods, they might end up landing their online business in trouble.
Black hat SEO does not prioritize the users’ benefit. Instead, they focus on gaining more traffic, visibility, and finally, advertisement income by achieving the top rank when appearing on the results pages.
This practice is considered a way of cheating the internet system as well as stealing other deserving sites’ success that are honest in following the procedures. However, Google is not prone to these malicious activities anymore as they update their algorithm for every new advancement taking place. The websites using Black Hat SEO techniques can be blocked and punished. To identify described sites, you must know a few things that these sites reflect.
HOW TO IDENTIFY BLACK HAT SEO TECHNIQUES?
Here are three different ways to classify any method as a black hat:
-When it breaks search engine service guidelines.
It is simple to understand. Google has a set of guidelines and rules that instruct the website administrators about the do’s and don’ts.
-When it prefers faster traffic gain rather than slow and original progress.
Black hat techniques are to attack the Google algorithm’s weak spots. They want to improve their SEO with minimum effort by meddling with the algorithm.
Even if these methods work, they do not work in the long run. Search engines keep updating their algorithm for better performance. Therefore, black hat SEO techniques could be alarming if you want your site to perform well in the long run.
-When it tries to manipulate the search engines.
A relevant website gives preference to the audience’s needs, whereas these techniques focus on manipulating the search engine to increase page ranks. It deceives their algorithm by showing they are useful to the users while they are not.
WHITE HAT SEO VS. BLACK HAT SEO
To grasp the concept of white hat and black hat in SEO, let us see how both are complete opposites of each other.
Black Hat SEO breaks the guidelines of the search engine to boost the website’s rank. A few examples are Cloaking, Keyword stuffing, Link Farm, etc.
White Hat SEO follows the guidelines set by the search engine to boost the site’s rank. A few examples are Content Optimizations, Link Building, Technical SEO, etc.
BLACK HAT SEO METHODS:
Here are 15 popular Black Hat SEO methods you should know about:
1. Cloaking
Cloaking is the technique where the content creator creates two different contents to fool the search engines. One of them is what the crawler sees while the user looks at a variation. The pages get ranked for a particular term that is not related to the content. This way web designers outwit the search engines by showing other content to raise their page rank. Cloaking is done for content that is in demand. This practice is considered unethical by Google. They show contents that are not user-friendly, but the bot sees another version of the page.
2. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing, on the other hand, is the overuse of keywords. Lots of keywords are put randomly in the blog that ends up forming meaningless and forced sentences. To prevent this, you should research the best keywords related to your subject. Let them fall naturally in between the phrases. The use of LSI keywords is one of the best options to avoid overfilling of the same terms repeatedly.
3. Link Farming
Link farming is a trick of exchanging hyperlinks between blogs in a network or a group. In this group, every website is linked to the other website irrespective of their field. Link farms are also known as Private Blog Networks (PBN). These blogs can be identified simply by looking at their content. They are filled with random links. Some websites offer services to boost the SEO of other blogs, these are nothing but link farms. Some link farms are companies that have their chain of blogs where all irrelevantly connected with one another for boosting SEO.
Links are certainly important for SEO. It does not mean that link building is a type of black hat SEO. Google values relevant links as a parameter for its results PageRank. Nonetheless, link farms violate the guidelines as it diverts traffic from the relevant websites. Google has updated its algorithm to identify link farms. Once reported, these pages could be punished by setting them in a low rank or deleting them entirely.
4. Content Automation
Content automation is a trick to produce the articles for the pages using a tool automatically. These tools would generate and publish the article on its own. The reason it falls under this is list is because of its harmful effects.
First of all, while hundreds of content creators are working hard to produce something unique and creative, content automation does not have any effort in building the illustrations. Even if this trick is good initially for SEO by giving a rapid growth in the ranking, it is short-lived. Google would soon detect it as a spam due to the sudden growth. It could be removed or blocked from search engines.
Keyword stuffing would occur when the content is built using a framed format. There are chances of gateway pages to occur as links are automatically generated. All of these are enough to tell the bot about the website’s authority.
5. Comment Spam/Blog Spam
Comment spams are old spam techniques that are very commonly used even now. Links and keywords are automatically commented on posts of other websites. Search engines are far ahead from this issue yet many end up commenting links and keywords in blog posts. You can increase your inbound links by doing this. If you do want to benefit from backlinking, comment something relevant and insightful.
To avoid spammers in your blog, apply the nofollow tag to the comments. This would prevent them from benefiting as you would not be giving them links for ranks in Google.
6. Buying and Selling Backlinks
Backlinks are generated when another website is linked to your site. It is a type of off-page SEO. However, purchasing inbound links through a link farm service is a risky way as this is against the rules. It is still okay to pay someone for linking to your website when both the blogs are relevant but it is not okay to pay a sum for links from shady sites that are not genuine.
Google raises the rank of a blog if the inbound links come from reputable addresses. If you create any content that is valuable to the users, your links will be shared among other websites without you needing to buy links.
Paid links, whether bought or sold are a part of black hat SEO as it disturbs the FTC if the relationship is kept unexposed. Acquiring high-quality links instead of gaining organic links is not the most upright way to boost ranks.
7. Duplicate Content
Content duplication is practiced to attract search engines. This tactic is also called a mirror site. The same content is published on a lot of pages of the website. This goes against Google’s instructions. It is better to check for plagiarism and duplications using a duplicate checker before posting any content online.
Sometimes, it does not have to be the same article but something similar to it. If the article appears at other locations apart from the first and original one, the content is considered a duplicate.
8. Negative SEO
Falsely reporting other competing websites on the search engine is the Negative SEO approach. The websites are reported for performing Black hat methods so that Google shuts down these opponents.
Falsely claiming that other websites for performing Black Hat SEO or making it appear that they are doing so- is not morally correct in itself. Penalizing them to reduce the race online is dishonest.
9. Hidden Text and Links.
Not every hidden text is a Black hat tactic. If a blog runner does it for better reading accessibility for the readers then it is not wrong in any way.
The fraudulent activity starts with links and texts are hid by changing the shade as the background, changing the font size that is so small to even see, or linking random punctuation or images that go out of notice.
Do not be fooled by these hidden formats and follow sites reputed only by the search engines. You should better avoid them as you do not know if the links contain passage to any virus or hazardous pages.
10. Doorway Pages
A Gateway Page is the one that leads you to another page. These are full of keywords and meaningless content to boost their rank. Once you enter this page, you will be automatically redirected to a separate haphazard page.
You would not find much useful information on these websites even if they are highly optimized. They appeal to the audience through their keywords but send them to other blogs that could be dangerous for them. The user can end up visiting multiple pages one by one automatically with the same endpoint when such pages appear in search results.
You can identify these doorway pages if they have more than one domain or pages targeting particular regions, blogs that redirect to other pages, or similar pages that are located closely in the search results display with unclear definitions.
11. Domain Squatting
Cybersquatting or domain squatting is the fishy act of registering a domain with a copyright word to benefit from it. According to the Anti-cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, domain squatting ‘is registering, trafficking in, or using an Internet domain name with a bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.’
The person who does this sells the domain to the entity or firm that owns the goodwill in an escalated cost range.
12. Data Scraping
Web scarping means taking original matter from relevant websites and publishing on your site. The bot downloads the content without the owner’s consent. It is usually done using automatic bots.
Content scraping is a straightforward way of robbing someone of their data. Scrapped contents are illegal to publish as the whole RSS feed of the original website is copied without the permission of the owner.
Google can easily find these content and you should avoid it as there is no benefit in harming your website. However, if you do paste a few texts from somewhere else to build links, tag them as canonical to tell the search engine that it is a copy of the original text.
13. Sneaky Redirects
The reason why Google calls this tactic ‘sneaky redirects’ is because the search engines and the viewers see two different pages. Redirects are useful to bring back the user to the correct page in case of any movement on the website through a resource. However, it is mostly misused by showing the crawler a normal content and the visitors being redirected to other pages. The case could also be such as when using two different systems. PC users view a normal page while the mobile users are redirected to spam blogs.
14. URL Hijacking
URL hijacking is somewhat similar to cybersquatting. The difference is that in this, the domain name is rather a slightly misspelt version of a famous website.
Typosquatting is done to confuse the viewers between the authentic and hijacked websites. These draw the traffic to their pages by the use of fake URLs. It is also called a sting site. The incoming traffic of these pages depends on the mistakes made by the users while typing the web addresses for the desired results on the browser.
15. Malicious Site Behavior
Malicious site behavior includes a lot of activities that are listed under Black Hat SEO. Be aware of the websites that induce viruses, Trojans, and malware in software downloads. These websites ask you to promote or install software while they change ad behavior. Some webpages change the search or complete page behavior without the users’ permission or by manipulating the location. Such occurrences are big red flags that one should never avoid.
These pages try to install unwanted software on your device in a spiteful manner.
REPORTING BLACK HAT SEO
You can file a report for any of these activities to Google Webspam Report for Google. Visit Google Tools to disavow any links
Report to Bing’s content removal facilities provided. For more features, take a look at Google Webmaster Tools.
Do not report falsely as that is also considered a type of Black Hat SEO.
CONCLUSION
There are as far as 50 black hat tactics for SEO that exist. Splogs, cookie dropping, rich snippet markup spams, etc., are some of them
Black Hat SEO techniques should be avoided at all costs as they could prove to be harmful to your websites. The search engines punish these activities by lowering the website’s page rank on SERP. You might even end up risking your page to the extent that Google either blacklists or removes it from the index.
Follow white hat SEO methods if you want to achieve success by creating a brand. Bring uniqueness, originality, and skills to your content. To provide security to your pages through various plug-ins and tactics to protect your online data from people who use black hat methods.
Long-lasting business can only exist when you follow the instructions wisely. It is not worth losing by falling into the wring directions and risking it all when you are aware that search engines update their algorithm regularly. It is not wise trying to outsmart Google that indexes millions of illustrations every day.