4 Toxic Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid
When it comes to digital marketing, SEO is one of the most important aspects of your business. Every business owner wants to rank #1 in search engines. Getting ranked on the first pages of search engines increases more chances to attract targeted traffic and sales.
The fact that SEO is crucial when it comes to getting a business to the world many people try to use any means possible to achieve results quickly. This is where many business owners and experts opt to use black hat SEO techniques. While this technique used to work in the past, today, it is the worst technique that can get you penalized by search engines. It is better to use white hat SEO. Although it takes time to get results through white hat SEO, it is the best way to rank your site legally.
In this article, we will share some of the Black Hat SEO techniques to avoid since it can affect your website badly even if it’s not now but some days to come. To be on the safe side, it is important to rank your site using White Hat SEO techniques since these techniques adhere to Google’s guidelines.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is a technique used by websites owners to blackmail search engine algorithms to improve website rankings. The techniques used are against search engines ToS. Although these techniques may work, the results are short term, in the long run, the consequences are serious since the techniques are unethical.
Is it ethical and worthy to use Black Hat SEO Tools to rank? My answer is No! White Hat SEO is the way to go if you want to befriend search engines and enjoy legal fruits. That being said, let’s find out the Black Hat SEO to avoid.
Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid
1- Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a Black Hat SEO technique and an SEO sin that you must not commit on your website at all cost. Keywords are search phrases used by customers and other web users to search for particular information of interest. Search engines also use keywords on websites to decide whether the information is worth to be displayed to users on search requests.
For instance, when you go to Google and search for the word Best SEO techniques, Google will display relevant websites with the searched term. Sometimes website owners think that adding significant amounts of keywords on their website can help search engines to display their websites in the search results but this is not the best way to go.
Keyword stuffing was a technique that used to help webmasters in the past when it comes to ranking higher in search engines but today, search engines have rolled out new algorithms that can detect overused keywords. If your website is found guilty of this sin, it will get penalized. What’s most important to search engine crawlers is your content. Is it high-quality? Is it helpful to the readers?
If your content is helpful and good quality, Google will definitely reward it.
2- Cloaking
Another Black Hat SEO technique is cloaking where you trick search engines and display different content to users.
Now, what happens in this technique is that you search for some information on search engines, you get the perfect results displayed, but when you click on the link, you are directed to an irrelevant website.
This deceptive method is detected by search algorithms, but when it accidentally slips into the eyes of the algorithms; users find themselves directed to unexpected websites. This method when detected can lead to a penalty or a complete ban of your website.
3- Identical Content
This is also called content theft and is a practice of stealing other people’s content and publishing it in your website. Another word for duplicate content is plagiarism where you directly pick content published on other websites. This can be knowingly or unknowingly. Once this is detected by search engines, your website gets deindexed and so, your efforts to achieve better rankings become useless.
The best way to stay safe from this Black Hat SEO technique is to write content that is yours; that does not appear on other websites. To avoid it, it is better to use duplicate content checkers once you are done writing.
Final Words
Before we conclude, another Black Hat SEO technique to avoid is Article Spinning. Website owners knew that duplicate content is bad for SEO and that is why a technique to avoid this sin was invented. This technique involves replacing actual words used on a particular article, with synonyms.
These are just a few of the illegal SEO techniques to avoid. There are many out there. So, learn and avoid them as much as you can.
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