What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is a technique used to increase a website’s rank by violating the search engine rules. Black hat seo technique involves keyword spamming, hidden links, hidden text etc to fool the search engines. Search engines do no encourage such activities. Search engines constantly work to improve the quality of the search results by displaying the most relevant websites in the search results. Adopting certain techniques to trick search engines for higher ranking may give you temporary results in short time, but soon the search engines identify such tricks and remove your website from the search results. It is a difficult task to correct all the black seo tactics and requesting the search engines to consider the website for indexing. So it is better to avoid such black hat seo tricks and stay away from seo companies that follow black hat seo.
Let us see what are the common black hat seo techniques you should avoid.
Keyword Stuffing or Stacking
Do not repeat the keywords continuously to form a sentence or a paragraph. A webpage should contain readable content where keywords appear naturally here and there in the page.
Hidden Text or Invisible Text
Hidden text means adding text visible only for search engines and hiding it visually. Do not add keywords repeatedly at the bottom of the webpage and make it invisible to the visitors by using css or matching the text color with background color.
Hidden Links
Adding hidden or invisible keyword links which can be read only by search engines but hidden from visitors is a black hat seo technique. Visitors come looking for the content and if it is not found, they quit your website immediately. Google keeps a count on such quick quits and marks your website as irrelevant.
Scraped Content
A website should contain unique quality content to get indexed by search engines. Do not copy content from another website and add it to your website. Search engines can detect the duplicate website and remove it from the search results.
Even if you own two similar websites, each website should contain different content, otherwise both websites will be removed from search results.
Duplicate Pages
Some people create several pages with keyword names but actually don’t put relevant content for the keyword. They simple copy paste the same content in all the pages thinking search engines will index their keyword pages. But what search engines like is unique relevant content for each page. Search engines simply remove all the pages from the search results if they detect duplicate pages. Once all your pages are removed from Google, getting it back in search results is a tedious time consuming process.
Cloaking
Presenting different content to search engines and visitors is called Cloaking. In order to get displayed in search results, some websites show relevant content for search engines, but what visitor sees will be totally different. For example, you search for ‘Fishing rod’, but the website shows you adult content. Cloaking can get your website removed from search results.
Low quality content
After Google’s Panda Update, low quality pages are removed from the search results. Do not simply fill up pages with poorly written content. Add proper headings and images. Check for spelling and grammar in your content and make sure you don’t copy it from other websites. Stick to the topic and make it special for the readers by adding different information related to the topic. Make sure your people are engaged with your content.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages or Gateway pages are fake pages designed only for search engines. These pages are highly optimized for top ranking keywords but when the actual visitor arrives to the page, it gets redirected to some other page which is not relevant to the search query. Such bad techniques are followed by some seo companies who does not know how to do seo.
Link Farming
Link Farm is a collection of websites which link to each other in order to increase their page rank. Such technique is mainly used to trick the search engine by creating an impression that the website is linked to many other websites.
Link Exchange
Link exchange is the process of exchanging links with other websites. Your website url will be hidden somewhere in other websites home page and you reciprocate it by adding the other website urls in your homepage. With link exchange you can earn more backlinks in short period, but it will not improve your rank instead your website gets degraded due to the poor quality of the links. Google checks for the quality of the website to which your website is linked. Getting more links via link exchange is bad for your website.