Black Hat SEO has been ongoing for a while now and shows no signs of stopping. Over the past two years, there has been significant development in Search Engine Optimisation and the whole digital marketing agency sector.
Because of this, many SEO Consultant have fundamentally altered their tactics. It’s harder now to rank highly on Google for competitive keywords, hence attending SEO training is an advantage.
In this article, you will learn how to avoid practices that fall under Black Hat SEO.
What is black hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is a technique that involves manipulating search engine results to increase the ranking of your website or individual pages. Black hat SEO strategies can be effective in the short run, but they have negative long-term effects and are widely seen as immoral.
By using black hat SEO techniques, your website may be penalised (either algorithmically or manually), which will most likely result in lower rankings and a drop in organic visitors.
Black Hat SEO Tactics to Avoid
Keyword Stuffing
Overusing the primary target keyword(s) on your page won’t help you rank. The common technique known as “keyword stuffing” will unquestionably have the opposite effect.
Sometimes black hat SEOs would use unnatural keyword placement on a page to try and manipulate a site’s rankings. It’s common for keyword stuffing to occur in haphazard chunks that are inserted outside of the main text or inside of paragraphs that sound completely absurd when read aloud.
Invisible/Hidden Text
Any text that readers cannot see but search engines can is considered invisible or hidden text. Black hat SEO typically employs hidden content to add more or unrelated keywords and raise the page’s rankings for more search queries. Several techniques for adding concealed text are prohibited by search engine standards.
Black hat examples of hidden text include setting the font size to 0, making the text white on a white backdrop, using CSS to make the text look off-screen, and hiding a link by just attaching it to a single character (such as a period).
Doorway/Gateway Pages
Making pages that are only used as a funnel to one page for particular search queries is something Google deems to be against the rules. These pages are often known as doorway pages or gateway pages.
Each page on your website should have a clear purpose; you shouldn’t merely create pages to try to rank for a broad range of relevant keywords.
Link Buying or Exchange
Google uses inbound links as a ranking factor for websites; the more sites that connect to yours, the more relevant your content must be. However, these inbound links ought to be organic. You can buy links pointing to your website pages, but search engines also take the context of such links into account.
Link buying is not a good SEO approach because it could harm your SEO if the links’ sources are unrelated to your website.
Cloaking
Giving consumers and search engines alternative information or URLs is a technique called cloaking. This gives users and search engines a unique experience.
This is a clear attempt to use content created for search engines to rank a website while sending visitors to a separate page (or object). This is an unethical practice that goes against search engine guidelines.
If you focus all of your efforts on providing the best user experiences possible, there’s a good possibility that the search engines will also adore your page.
Conclusion
The most important thing to remember is that any website using black hat SEO techniques runs the danger of being penalised by search engines like Google.
In general, we caution against employing black hat methods on your own website. If you need help making your site more visible online, be careful to learn how to rank your website using methods that do not violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
If you like this article, you may want to read this article about Building a Digital Marketing Team? Understand Their Roles.
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