Blackhat SEO is a practice against search engine guidelines, used to get a site ranking higher in search results. These unethical tactics don’t solve for the searcher and often end in a penalty from search engines. Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks.
Appearing in search results is vital for business growth, but there’s a right and wrong way of doing search engine optimization. The dark art of black hat SEO is the wrong way. Black hat SEO seeks to game search engine algorithms, rather than solve for the user. Instead of earning the right to rank highly on search engine results pages black hat SEO uses shady tactics to get you there. Sustained use of black hat SEO techniques is likely to damage your presence in search engines rather than improve it.
How does blackhat SEO work?
Blackhat SEO is the practice of going against search engine guidelines to manipulate SERPs (search engine results page) for higher rankings. Marketers found to be using black hat SEO methods can be issued Google penalties, be wiped from search engines or see metrics completely drop.
What is an example of blackhat SEO?
Common examples of blackhat SEO strategies include the use of invisible text, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, page swapping, or the addition of unrelated keywords to a page. Each of these techniques are defined below, with insight as to how they can be detrimental to any business website.
Black Hat Techniques in SEO
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of filling your content with irrelevant keywords in an attempt to manipulate where the page ranks on search results pages. Adding multiple variations of keywords where they add no value creates a bad experience for users. It may also cause your page to rank for irrelevant queries.
Google explains keyword stuffing as:
• Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural.
• Blocks of text listing cities and states a web page is trying to rank for
• Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value.
Here’s an example of keyword stuffing for a website selling outbound marketing software:
“We are in the business of selling outbound marketing software. Outbound marketing software is what we sell. If you are thinking of getting outbound marketing software get in touch with one of our outbound marketing software consultants.”
The Risks of Black Hat SEO
There are significant risks involved with using black hat tactics to rank your website, and that’s the reason why most SEOs choose not to consider such approaches. The majority of the SEO industry deems these practices to be completely unethical.
When looking at Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, we can clearly see that their guidance on the basic principles of SEO:
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Low-quality content
Low-quality content could be an existing article that is paraphrased by a writer or computer. These pieces of content tend to be written quickly and used as part of outreach or link building campaigns. This type of content doesn’t offer any value to the reader and is used solely for link building – something we will talk about later.
Similarly, some site owners will use text the same colour as their background so that they can ‘hide’ keywords within their pages. This allows a site to rank for keywords that are seemingly invisible. This can drive traffic to a site via irrelevant keywords which will boost their traffic.
Paying for links
The importance of backlinks in an SEO strategy is unavoidable. The more backlinks (external sites that link to your own) a site has, the more Google considers it to be trustworthy and authoritative.
It can be tricky getting links to a site that’s fairly new. After all, why would anyone link to a site that itself doesn’t have any traffic or authority? That’s why many SEOs pay for links. Countless sites and blogs will charge SEO marketers money for placing content and links on their site. This could be anything from £15 to over £200 and in some cases, more.
The problem with paid links
Paying for links is walking on a fine line. You may see short-term results but if discovered, you could be heavily penalised. This undoes all your work and means you’ve wasted a lot of money.
Instead of paying for links, you should focus on creating high-quality content that is relevant to your industry. Promote it on social media organically and boost these posts for extra exposure. It will take a lot longer to see the benefits but when you do, they are authentic and genuine and will never be at risk of being ‘taken away’ from you. Not like they would if done through black hat methods.
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