15 Oct Top 6 Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid

Every search engine has a set of guidelines for SEO experts and website owners to implement on their websites. Google has webmaster guidelines, which include quality guidelines and general guidelines. By providing these guidelines, Google lays down a path of white hat SEO techniques that you should use. It also helps you in avoiding the black hat SEO techniques.

Black hat SEO may sound good for short-term achievements, but it can hurt your web presence in the long term. Some people consider black hat SEO techniques as a shortcut to improve search visibility and a cheaper method to rank well.

What is Black Hat SEO?

In simple words, black hat SEO is a method of getting a better ranking on search engines by implementing unethical SEO techniques. By using black hat SEO techniques, you are not only violating the SEO guidelines set by the search engines but also harming your website. Black hat SEO is known by names like spamdexing, search spam, search engine poisoning, web spam, etc.

One of Google’s basic principles states:

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?”

When you work on your website’s SEO, it is important to consider and implement the above-mentioned basic principle by Google. Implementing white hat SEO strategies will help your website have better web presence.

Top 6 Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid

Keyword Stuffing

Writing your main keyword more again and again in your content is a simple way of keyword stuffing. If you have crammed keywords into your content, then you should consider re-writing that content. Keyword stuffing can break your website’s SEO easily. Try not to repeat keywords unnecessarily in your content. According to Alexa, the percentage of keywords in your content should be like:

Keyword Density = (Number of words in copy) / (Number of times keyword appears in copy)

Spamming Blog Comments

Sometimes you may notice a comment on your blog post with an unrelated promotional link and some text. Spammers make these types of comments. Spammers use such comments to create free backlinks to the websites.

To stop spammers from commenting links and irrelevant information on your blog posts, you can disable comments. You can also change comment or discussion settings in WordPress for better security and comment moderation.

Publishing Low-Quality Content

A web page or a post that has less than 300 words is called a thin content page. Search engines consider the amount of content they can find on your website, so it is always good to have long yet informative pages or posts. Publishing low-quality content can harm your website rather than helping it.

Content Cloaking

Cloaking is a type of spamdexing. Content cloaking is a method of SEO in which the content for the user differs from the content shown to the search engine spiders or crawlers. With content cloaking, you are deceiving the search engines by showing them certain content and letting them believe the website has that content and showing different content to the users.

Duplicate Content

Having multiple pages with the same content repeatedly will affect your website. Search engines can detect duplicate content and can penalise you for having duplicate content on your website. It is better to avoid having duplicate content than to have multiple pages with the same content. Having duplicate content in multiple domains can also affect your website negatively. This will also result in a bad user experience (UX).

Invisible Text and Links

To increase the number of words and to avoid thin content penalties, sometimes people put content that is not visible to the user. Adding invisible text or links is a technique used for manipulating search engines. However, this practice violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It is also known as the keyword spamming technique. People make the colour of the content the same as the background colour or make the font size too small to even see. This content may not be visible to the user, but it is visible to the search engines.

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