The Dark Art of Black Hat SEO: 17 Techniques to Avoid

Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, concealment & private link networks which can give algorithmic & manual penalties from search engines like Google & Bing.

The Dark Art of Black Hat SEO: 17 Techniques to Avoid

Appearing in search results is vital to business growth, but there is a right and wrong way to optimize search engines. The Dark Art of Black Hat SEO Is the Wrong Way. Google severely penalizes black hat tactics, whether knowingly or not. Read about 17 of them that can hurt your optimization efforts.

Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, concealment, and the use of private link networks. Here are 17 black hat practices you should avoid because they can give you an algorithmic or manual penalty. If you've been adding footer links with commercial anchor text at scale to manipulate results, Google can likely identify and penalize you for doing so. They used to be much more frequent in the 90s and early 2000s, particularly among fan pages of different TV shows, movies, musicians, etc.

As the name suggests, duplicate content refers to the well-known content creation practice of “copy and paste” across domains and means that blocks of content copied from different sources exactly match each other or look a lot alike.

Search engines

prefer single content, so deliberately duplicated content across different domains is perceived as one of the worst black hat techniques. When the same results are found in Google's listing, it's a clear sign of manipulating search engine rankings and usually results in a poor user experience. Duplicate content not only affects different domains, but also a domain. However, the second case is not that serious because it is usually a sign of lack of knowledge or negligence.

Therefore, it is crucial to implement a canonical tag to indicate the original version of your article. This way, you make other copies invisible to Googlebots. Article turning is a similar technique to the duplicate content problem (above) and is becoming increasingly popular. This is higher-level plagiarism and involves the use of special software that takes the copied source and reformulates it for later use as a “new” and unique publication. The modification efficiently reduces the risk of being detected by any plagiarism tool.

What happens when you insert the term “cover-up” into the Google search bar? You will be given a Google Knowledge result that first explains “cloaking” as a search engine technique that presents a completely different content or URL to the user than to the search engine spider. In fact, this method of SEO is considered deceptive because it tricks search engines to get the desired rankings for target keywords. In addition, it's a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because, in most cases, it serves people with irrelevant results. By definition, keyword stuffing involves overusing the same keywords on a page to maximize your visibility and organic traffic. Content full of keywords doesn't seem natural, and that's why it's not easy to use.

Unamo's website optimization qualifier can detect keyword stuffing on your page and warn you about its consequences. Discover 5 ways to create content that can be found without filling in keywords. I agree with almost all of your points. But there are definitely places for paid links and that guy, as long as they're not too done and worked with natural SEO, you're going to be good and can REALLY help. Black Hat SEO are tactics used to rank a website that violates search engine guidelines.

Black Hat SEO techniques attempt to manipulate search engine algorithms to increase a site's ranking on SERPs. Search engines, such as Google to Bing, make it very clear what types of practices go against their terms. They are also quite clear as to the possible outcomes if you violate their guidelines. Using black hat SEO tactics can lead to your website being penalized (either algorithmically or with manual action), which means lower ranking positions and, most likely, a decrease in organic traffic. Private blog networks (PBNs) used to be commonplace for marketers looking for a quick supply of link capital to a new or underperforming web property. PBNs are a community of high-authority websites created for the sole purpose of creating links and promoting sponsored content.

These websites are often ridiculed as “link farms” because they are configured to exploit Google's PageRank algorithm. Jamming your articles with as many keywords as possible is no longer an effective strategy for ranking. WordPress and content management system (CMS) plugins, such as Yoast SEO and All in One SEO, can help detect keyword stuffing before submitting an article. The last thing you want is to produce an article that reads unnaturally or as spam, which is a common reason why Google imposes penalties for PageRank. While no one knows for sure what keyword density Google's PageRank algorithm favors most, many SEO professionals aim to have 1-2% of their article consist of the keyword they're trying to rank with. If the title or headline of your article has to do, for example, with how to add gold or silver investments to your retirement savings account, don't mislead them by having the content discuss an unrelated topic, such as stock market investing.

Baiting and switching with your readers is called “content concealment”, and it can result in a severe penalty for your domain. In the old days of Black Hat SEO, these techniques, tricks, tactics, or whatever you want to call them may have worked until search engines began taking steps and updating algorithms to penalize websites using such Black Hat SEO techniques. And because search engines don't like to be fooled by themselves or their users they took steps to keep search results as clean and accurate as possible. Well that could happen if you fill your site with keywords; you and your site will suffer equally. Now you see that it's no longer a myth that using keyword-rich anchor texts for internal links to overoptimize your website can bring you a “big penalty” from Google. Sometimes your SEO specialist is so eager to get you to the first page of Google they'll neglect relevance. If your SEO specialist takes you to the first page of Google for irrelevant keywords then both you and your site will suffer equally. And lastly don't forget about paid links; they can really help if done naturally with good SEO practices!.

Olivia Bouchey
Olivia Bouchey

Lifelong internet nerd. Avid twitter guru. Professional food practitioner. Problem solver. Amateur baconaholic.

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