What is Black Hat SEO? Methods To Avoid Black Hat SEO

black hat seo

Going back 10 years ago, many people have manipulated marketing tactics about SEO tricking algorithms into adopting tactics to make Google believe that your website is the best result of search queries. I misunderstood that there was. 

This should never have been the case, and SEO should always focus its efforts on getting the best results on the web, not just pretending it was. However, Google’s algorithms weren’t even more sophisticated at the time, especially when it came to detecting web spam. Many marketers have enthusiastically used black hat SEO Strategies to rank their websites. But times have changed. This guide details techniques to avoid if you don’t want to ruin your algorithms and webmaster quality guidelines.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Blackhat SEO is a set of SEO techniques used to improve a website’s ranking on search engine results pages that violate search engine guidelines. Black hat SEO is also known as spam texting because it uses spam methods to manipulate the algorithm. These Top 10 Digital Marketing Companies prefer White Hat SEO because it is the best SEO method out in the market.

Now that you understand the basics of black hat SEO, let’s take a look at some black hat SEO methods which can harm your website.

6 Black Hat Methods To Avoid 

Buying/selling links 

Quality and relevant links can increase traffic to your domain while letting Google’s algorithms know that you are a trusted source. Good backlinks also help Google map your site, making it easier for you to get a better idea of ​​what your users are doing and provide them in your search results. However, purchasing the link violates Google’s webmaster guidelines and does not work according to Google. If caught, you will be subject to automatic and manual penalties that can affect specific pages and, worse, the entire site. Google keeps track of links that are likely to be purchased and links that are acquired.

Duplicate Content

As the name implies, duplicate content refers to the well-known “copy and paste” process of creating content between domains, where blocks of content copied from different sources match or are very similar. It means that you are. Search engines prefer their own content, so deliberate duplication of content between different domains is considered one of the worst black hat techniques. If the same result is found on Google’s list, it’s a clear sign of search engine ranking operations and usually leads to a poor user experience. 

Duplicate content affects not only different domains but also domains. However, this is usually a sign of ignorance or carelessness, so the second case is less serious. Therefore, it is important to implement a canonical tag to display the original version of the article. This way, you can hide other copies from Googlebot.

Private Blog Networking (PBN)

A private blog network (PBN) is a group of institutional websites used primarily for link-building purposes.  PBN sites use low-quality links to link to the main website in order to influence search engines. Each of these PBN sites links to the main site without linking to other sites. PBNs typically link using expired domains. These domains are sites that have previously acquired some privileges. PBN is one of the black hat SEO technologies because these expired domains are purchased only to be included in the private blog network to create operational outbound links.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword abuse means repeating a particular keyword in a copy of the text, even if it is not relevant. This seems like a good idea if you want to optimise this post for search engines. 

However, worrying about keyword density rather than writing for humans is a black hat SEO technique that quickly undermines content rankings. 

Also, keyword abuse can cause viewers to lose interest in your text, as it looks like a language that only bots can understand. 

Similarly, including irrelevant keywords in blog posts indicate that search engines are tricking algorithms into placing content at the top of  SERPs. This can also incur a Google penalty.

Cloaking

Cloaking allows search engines to display content that is different from the user. This basically fools both users and search engine crawlers and violates Google’s webmaster guidelines. 

Users expect content to appear on search engine results pages, but in the end, it’s something else.  

Similar to keyword abuse, one form of cloaking is to use text that is invisible to the user. Search engines believe they are providing useful and valuable content to their users, but they see things that don’t provide what they’re looking for, such as B. A series of images. Search engines only show the text on the page because it has a hard time understanding what the image is, especially if no alt text is used, but because the text is hidden, the user Only images are displayed in. 

There are several ways to enable cloaking with JavaScript and HTML tricks, but the important point is that it’s a bad habit and should be avoided.

Hidden Redirects

Redirect redirects the user to another web page when the user clicks the URL. Redirects are often used outside of the intended purpose of Black Hat SEO. This method requires you to redirect the search engine crawler to the page. At the same time, all other users are redirected to another website. 

Another example is to redirect a reliable page with lots of backlinks to a completely irrelevant page in order to improve your ranking in search results. Most permissions are transferred from one page to another using  301 redirects. This means that Black Hat SEO experts can only use redirects to manipulate search results.  

Use redirects only for the purposes for which they were created. For example, changing the domain of a website or combining two contents into one web page. In some cases, it is permissible to use JavaScript to redirect the user.

Conclusions

Whether you’re a small business or a large organisation, it’s clear that black hat marketing is bad for your business. It has quick results, but it’s unethical traits are a bad move for those who are trying to improve the brand’s credibility and reputation. 

To improve your rankings and see the value your website brings to your users, we recommend that you use White Hat’s marketing techniques instead. Not only does the benefit last much longer, but it follows legal practices and does not run the risk of penalties such as being permanently removed from search engine results.