Ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages) is the dream of every business owner. So, they use hundreds of tricks and tactics to improve their ranking. But, if they use wrong tricks to get their website ranked, this will hurt the search engine ranking.
So, such techniques and tactics that destroy your search engine ranking instead of increasing it are named Black Hat SEO.
Black Hat SEO tricks seem a rapid solution but just remember, by using these techniques you will get disapproval of search engines such as Google and Bing, etc. that will lead your site’s ranking down faster.
Do you know the term “Black Hat” used in Western movies to show the difference between “bad guys” and “good guys”? Good guys used to wear white hats while bad guys used to wear black hats.
The term Black Hat is recently used to define computer hackers, virus makers, and those who bring about unethical actions with computers.
Coming to the point, Black Hat SEO is such a technique that is used to rank a site on SERPs (search engine result pages) that disobey search engine guidelines. Such tricks were being used to enhance a website’s ranking in SERPs trying to manipulate search engine algorithms.
But within time, search engines are getting cleverer and more active. All the search engines like Google and Bing clearly tell what kind of techniques go against their terms and conditions. They also are damn clear on the potential upshots if you go against their guidelines.
Using such techniques can cause your website to get penalized which means lower website ranking and less organic traffic.
Risks of Black Hat SEO
There are a large number of risks involved with trying black hat practices to rank your website higher. So, the majority of the SEO industry considers them to be completely unethical.
But, a small percentage of marketers and SEO users are still active who try to cheat the system in order to track their site’s success fast. If they, in some cases, get their desired result, it would not be long-lived.
We can see clearly on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines the guidance on SEO rule by Google:
“___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 user? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
So, you can clearly learn from Google’s guidelines that Black Hat SEO surely are not beneficial for users as they such violations, according to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, “may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise affected by an algorithmic or manual spam action.”
Black Hat SEO Tricks to Escape From
According to Google’s Guidelines, the following tricks are considered Black Hat SEO as they hurt your website instead of helping it:
Table Of Content:
- Keyword Stuffing
- Automatically Generated Content
- Hidden Text or Links
- Thin Content
- Cloaking
- Sneaky Redirects
Keyword Stuffing
Using Keywords in your content enhances your site’s visibility in SERPs. But just remember, making excessive use of your page’s target keyword(s) will not impact your website positively.
Using target keywords again and again in your piece of content will bother the reader as it makes the content something artificial and unnatural.
So, it definitely will lead to the decline of organic traffic.
Automatically Generated Content
Content that has been generated programmatically is known as Automatically Generated Content or commonly called Auto-generated content. Such content doesn’t help the user so Google may take action on it.
A few examples of such content are:
- Piece of content that may contain search terms but doesn’t make any sense to the reader.
- Text that is translated by using an automated tool and published as it is, without human review.
- Content created using automated synonymizing techniques.
- Copy text from different web pages and combine it without adding adequate value.
Above are a few basic examples of automatically generated content. You can find more by having a deep dive into Google’s Guidelines.
Hidden Text or Links
Hiding text or links in your content to manage Google’s search ranking can be considered deceptive and false and is against Google’s guidelines.
Text can be veiled in many ways like:
- Creating white text on a white background
- Using CSS to make text off-screen
- Selecting the 0-font size
- Placing text behind an image
- Concealing a link by merely linking one small character. For example a hyphen in the center of a passage
Such hidden text means this is merely for search engines not for visitors. So, in the eyes of search engines like Google and Bing, such hidden text and hidden links are deceptive as it is a negative trick to get ranked instead of serving the visitors.
Thin Content
One of the most significant ranking factors for a website is the quality content that includes appropriately used relevant keywords or key phrases, plenty of authentic information about the topic, and express the subject matter of your content.
However, many website owners try to enhance their web pages’ ranking and attract users by crafting pages full of words but no valuable content.
This is against the rules of Google and it will surely take action against domains having such content that doesn’t have substantial value for visitors.
Cloaking
Cloaking in SEO is an illegal action and considered a Black Hat SEO technique as it is an attempt to distort Google by creating cloak content.
Do you know what is cloaking? It is an SEO (search engine optimization) trick in which the content presented to the search engine crawler is different from that is presented to the users.
In most simple words, in the cloaking technique, the information or data that is provided to the visitor is totally different from the content shown to search engine bots.
For example:
- Present an HTML text to Google and other search engines while providing a page of flash files or images to the visitors
- Show keywords or key phrases in the text merely when the user is recognized as a search engine crawler and not when a human visitor approaches the page
A website that involves Cloaking Technique would be penalized by Google in such a way that it may be banned permanently.
Sneaky Redirects
What is redirecting? Well! Redirecting is the process of making the visitors reach a different URL than the one they exactly requested.
Redirecting process is a common part of Search Engine Optimization as it is a preferred technique to ensure that your website is well organized.
Several reasons are there to redirect one URL to another, like when moving your website to a novel URL, or uniting more than a few pages into one.
However, sometimes redirecting is used to deceive the search engines as the content displayed to the users is the different one than that is made available to the search engine crawlers.
So, using redirects in a wrong way violates the Google Webmaster Guidelines. It is considered a deceptive act because it tries to present different content to the users and Google bots.
Therefore, your website will surely be punished by Google.
CONCLUSION and CONSEQUENCES
Black Hat SEO Techniques, mentioned above, are extremely risky to practice because sooner or later, they are surely noticed by search engines.
As a result, a website can be punished, or sometimes it may be banned permanently.
Do you know guys any other black hat SEO tricks that are getting more popular or the one that irritates you the most? Share those tactics with us. We are anxious to know.