BLACK HAT SEO HACKS THAT WILL RUIN YOUR BUSINESS

Black Hat SEO are techniques and strategies used to get higher search ranking. The dark angel only focuses on search engines, and has no concern for the personal interaction with its audience.

Black Hat SEO is not something to be taken lightly, as it completely manipulates and breaks search engine rules. You don’t want to jeopardise the stability of your website, brand, and your business by attempting to cheat the system.

So what are these Black Hat hacks, and how can you avoid them?

Throughout this extensive Byter guide, we will explore the techniques and strategies which classify as Black Hat SEO hacks. These include: Keyword stuffing, Cloaking, Sneaky Redirects, Poor Quality Content, Paid Links, Rich Snippets, and Blog Comment Spam. 

White Hat SEO is the complete antithesis to Black Hat SEO, since its techniques only target a human audience. White Hat SEO aims to deliver content which the audience genuinely cares about, and content which they will want to read. It’s a more ethical approach that abides by the terms and guidelines set out by search engines.

BLACK HAT HACKS TO AVOID

KEYWORD STUFFING

This is the practice of filling your content with irrelevant keywords in an attempt to manipulate where the page ranks on search results pages. This only creates a bad experience for the users , and could potentially lead to your page being ranked for irrelevant queries.

Don’t let this stain your reputation!

Examples of keyword stuffing are:

·         Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value

·         Blocks of text listing cities and states the web page is trying to rank for

·         Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural

It is so easy to fall into this trap because you really want your page to reach as many people as possible. So, you decide to pack in as much information as you can, but this is wrong. Instead, you should concentrate on creating useful content that focuses on topics over keywords.

EXAMPLE:

“We are in the business of selling outbound marketing software. Outbound marketing software is what we sell. If you are thinking of getting outbound marketing software get in touch with one of our outbound marketing software consultants.”

CLOAKING

Cloaking involves showing one piece of content to users and a different piece of content to search engines. Websites practicing Black Hat SEO will do this in order to make content rank for a variety of terms, both irrelevant or relevant. It doesn’t matter to them! Spam websites will often do this to try and avoid a search engine bot finding out about the useless content they are sending to users.

Tailoring your content to different groups of users is acceptable. For example, a publisher like Amazon or Apple might change the ads that appear on a page in order to fund their content. As long as you are not just changing the content that appears for search engine crawlers.

If you are curious to find out how Google sees your website you can use the fetch as Google tool and compare this to what users see.

SNEAKY REDIRECTS

A redirect involves sending someone to a different URL than the one they initially clicked. I’m sure it has happened to you many times before. Black hat SEO users redirect outside of the purpose they are intended for. An example of this is redirecting a search engine crawler to one page and all other users to another page.

Redirects should only be used for the purpose they were designed. For instance, you might change website domain, or consolidate two pieces of content. The same way that LinkedIn redirects you to someone’s full profile when you log in.

Sneaky redirects should be avoided since they violate the guidelines of search engines such as: Google.

POOR QUALITY CONTENT

Poor quality content is content that is of no value to the searcher, and is also a common practice in Black Hat SEO. This also includes content scraped from another website, either by a bot or a person.

At one point, search engines like Google weren’t very good at recognising content that had been copied from other websites. However, since The Google Panda update in 2011, this has resolved the issue.

Adding invisible keywords to your content is also a prohibited practice. Some websites that engage in Black Hat SEO do this by making the text the same colour as the page background. This enables the Black Hat hacker to hide content on your website.

PAID LINKS

This one is pretty simple. Search engines like Google strictly ban the buying and selling of links. They state on their website that “any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme. As well as this, it is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines”.

Basically, you should avoid paying any other site to link to your content.

A helpful tip is to use the disavow links tool if you need to remove any paid links. Also, Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s web spam team recommends looking at FTC guidelines.

RICH SNIPPETS

Rich snippets are also known as structured data and schema. It allows you to change how your content us displayed on search engine results page. It makes your content stand out from competitors.

However, Black Hat SEO involves providing inaccurate information in structured data to fool search engines and users. For example, awarding themselves with five stars from a fake review site.

This is a very risky practice as search engines like Google encourage users to report websites misusing structured data.

 BLOG COMMENT SPAM

This Black Hat technique involves including a link to your website in blog comments. This practice happens less often since Google updated their algorithm. Nonetheless, it is a spammy way of getting links to your website, and we highly recommend avoiding this practice.

If you own a publication, forum or community that allows comments you need to take care to ensure that your comments section can’t be spammed by either bots or people. Search engines like Google will demote or completely remove pages containing spam from the search results.

To avoid this, you can use anti-spam tools like Google’s free reCAPTCHA tool. It offers you a valuable way to mitigate the risk of spam user generated content.

Black Hat SEO is not illegal, but it does violate webmaster guidelines set out by search engines. Above all, it’s against the rules so don’t risk your business over shady practices. Remember, Google is getting better everyday at catching Black Hat hackers and sly SEO techniques. So just grow your business the right way, and you should have no issues.

Congratulations! You have just been taught detailed tips on Black Hat hacks, and how to avoid them. Now you can spend your time adopting the lifestyle of a White Hat techniques, and letting your family and friends know about your newfound skills. Be sure to let us know how you do on your SEO path. We’d love to hear about it!

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