Many developers and business owners will turn to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques for their websites to achieve a good rank. White hat SEO techniques represent a set of guidelines and design principles that you can use to get better results with search engines. However, there are also some techniques that you shouldn’t implement. These are called black hat techniques. Unfortunately, some novice web designers have trouble telling the difference between white and black hat SEO. To help you know what’s good for your site and what isn’t, we will be looking at the most popular black hat SEO techniques to avoid.
What are black hat SEO techniques?
If you are confused, let’s first go into the details about what black hat SEO means. Most search engines will have a set of guidelines that promote quality website design. These guidelines are in place to benefit users and ensure they have a good experience on the web. If you purposefully design your website to go against the terms of service of the search engines, you can expect to receive a penalty.
Unfortunately, it is also possible to apply specific black hat SEO techniques without knowing it. Therefore, we recommend hiring a trusted digital agency that offers legitimate SEO services done by the book. Occasionally, you should also check out the latest search engine web design guidelines to see what’s changed.
Another way to make sure that your website is performing well and that everything is in accordance with SEO guidelines is to have an audit as part of your online reputation management. Audits can tell you how well your site performs and which areas need improvement. They can also be a great way to detect any SEO penalties to your site that you didn’t know about. If you find anything out of the ordinary, you can fix those issues or have your website redesigned.
Five popular black hat SEO techniques to avoid
Below are the most common bad techniques people use to increase ranking on their sites.
Keyword stuffing
Inserting relevant keywords into the pages of your website is a legitimate SEO strategy. Although keywords are considered beneficial for SEO, placing too many of them on one page can have diminishing returns, or worse – it can be viewed as a black hat practice. When you are placing keywords, you should use common sense and write your articles so that they sound natural. There isn’t a magic number for keywords, so you can use them when they feel appropriate.
On the other hand, unnatural wording just so that you could place a few more keywords in your text is a practice that is bound to raise a few red flags. You should also avoid putting too many keywords on a single page. Instead, you can have separate pages for each keyword you want to rank for. By doing this, your pages won’t be in direct competition with each other for search engine rank.
Low-quality content
It’s no secret that content is the lifeblood of every website. Well-written articles are the best way to get search engines to notice you. At the same time, we know that creating quality content takes a lot of time. However, this is true for any legitimate SEO technique, and it may take some time to see the results of your efforts. For this reason, we suggest that you don’t rush the process and only output quality articles that hold genuine value for the reader. On the other hand, if you create plenty of low-quality, throwaway content, you won’t be receiving a boost to your SEO anytime soon. Your website could even be flagged for creating spammy articles that serve no purpose to the end-user.
Link farms
Backlinks are a great way to boost the relevance of your website. However, purchasing links and link farms are popular black hat SEO techniques to avoid since Google can punish you if you have excessive numbers of low-quality links leading to your site. If you hire a digital marketing company to boost your SEO, look at their pricing packages and the number of links they offer. Fraudulent companies can offer unrealistic numbers of links for sale. If you suspect that anything suspicious is going on, you can always ask to see their portfolio. We strongly advise against purchasing links in bulk from farms since that can bring down your site’s reputation in the eyes of the search engine.
Automatically generated content
In a rush to get websites up and running and to produce plenty of pages in a short time, web developers sometimes turn to automatically-generated or duplicate content. However, every page on your site needs to be unique and contribute something of value. You can hire the best web designers who can develop a custom web design that suits your needs. But, regardless of who is designing your site, be aware that you shouldn’t create pages just to have more of them. Search engines will quickly see through this ruse and punish you with negative SEO.
Comment spam
User engagement is a substantial contributing factor to how Google sees your site. If many users interact with your site, leaving comments and sharing links – your site is likely to get promoted on results pages. Website owners can sometimes get tempted by this and make fake comments to increase engagement.
Another popular tactic is to use bots to leave spammy comments on other people’s websites and blogs. These bots can leave comments with links leading back to your site to increase the number of links. However, any type of comment spam is frowned upon by search engines and will cause you to receive a penalty.
In summary
We have gone over the five most popular black hat SEO techniques to avoid if you want to stay clear of manual and automatic penalties from Google. Instead of taking shortcuts that will cause trouble for your website, we recommend building SEO with the long-term health of your site in mind.
