Black Hat SEO is an aggressive practice against search engine algorithms, employed to get a website higher in rankings. These unethical techniques often result in a permanent penalty from search sites and do not resolve for the client. Black Hat techniques consist of keyword stuffing, cloaking, or using secret link networks. These techniques are considered unethical by search engines and black hat by most Internet users. Google banned the use of black hat tactics in 2021.
See what we mean in this super video on black Hat SEO vs Gray / White:
A black hat strategy is different than traditional search engine optimization techniques in that it does not make use of quality or other algorithms that might benefit your website. For example, if you have a website about dog training, you would want to rank for particular terms that people might use when searching for this topic. You wouldn’t want to rank for “how to train your dog” because many people would search for this topic using completely different means. An unethical black hat strategy goes against the legitimate way of how search engines rank a website.
For instance, if you have a website about dog grooming, you might think about using invisible keywords. Invisible keywords, or “invisible keywords”, are words that are not visible to search engine algorithms, so they are not listed with the regular keywords. For example, if someone were searching for how to groom a dog, they might search for “groom”, “dogs”, “puppies”, and “scratching”. If you used invisible keywords in your website text, you would get a higher ranking on search engine results for these specific search phrases. However, these search phrases are completely wrong and will not help your website at all.
Another tactic that can be abused by some businesses is link farms. Link farms are websites that are designed to look like legitimate websites when search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo look them up. Unfortunately, these search engine algorithms are designed to recognize these links and pass them by, resulting in the loss of ranking and even the banning of a site from using them. You want to avoid black hat seo strategies like link farms as much as possible. Even though it might look like you’re getting your website ranked fairly well, it could be slipping through the cracks in the search engines like an unseen thief in the night.
Another tactic that you want to avoid as much as possible is using sneaky redirects. A sneaky redirect is placed on a page that looks natural to the search engine crawlers but where links are leading to the main website of the business. This is done in an attempt to try and trick the search engine crawlers into thinking that the business website is the direct result of the user who clicked on the link to the business instead of to the search engine’s servers. There are many places that you can find sneaky redirects, and most SEO experts advise against using them as they can cost you rankings with the major search engine.
Your site must have quality content because search engines like it when they see quality content. The reason is that search engines like to provide genuine information to their users. If you have duplicate content that isn’t updated or changed much, then the search engine will deem your site to be unreliable and not to be trusted. This can have drastic consequences as you’ll be getting no search engine rankings at all and your customers will never find you. So always make sure that your website has fresh, relevant, and up-to-date content and you’ll be fine.
The Black Hat SEO tactics that we talked about above are very spammy and not ethical in any way. When it comes to ranking your site, there are certain guidelines that you have to follow to stay below the index of search engines like Google and yahoo. Among these guidelines is the Nofollow attribute, which tells the search engine not to count your link when it sends out queries. Another important factor is link ratio, which tells the search engine how many links a page receives from other websites. This is known as the Google slap because the search engine will punish you by decreasing your page’s rank and sometimes even banning you.
However, if you’re just starting with your online marketing efforts, it’s highly advised that you stick with the proven strategies mentioned above. There are a lot of black hat SEO companies out there and you want to make sure that you don’t get trapped by these unscrupulous marketers. Keep in mind that although search rankings are important for online marketing, quality content is just as crucial. Creating quality content that is truly informative and useful to your readers is what will get you traffic in the first place, which is why you need to write unique and original articles to achieve high search rankings. If you want to become successful online, you must master the art of SEO and start earning money while enjoying your online business.