Every business’ goal these days is to rise to the top of search engines like Google and Yahoo since it increases sales and supporting the growth of your business. By hook or by crook some will say but did you know that these people who use every dirty trick in the book suffer the wrath of Google? Sometimes you might be unaware that you’re using the same tactics as these black hat SEO copywriters and it will get your website thrown in the bin just like theirs.
What is Black Hat SEO?
By hook or by crook is the Black Hat SEO copywriter’s motto as their aim is to make sure their websites are at the top of the list. They do this by subtly manipulating the system to tilt the odds in their favor. These practices of course, are against the terms of service of most search engines and will quickly get your website flagged as a black hat website. This means that your website will end up not showing up on search engines at all.
Common Black Hat Tactics
These copywriters have a myriad of techniques and tactics they’ll use to get ahead of everyone else. From hiding keywords in plain sight to redirecting users to the wrong website. These are just a few of the techniques that you should be avoiding to avoid getting penalized by Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is trying to jam in as many of the same keywords as possible in a single article or post. For example: if you own a cosmetics website and decide you want to cheat the system, you’ll try to put as many “beauty products” or “anti-aging” in as many sentences as possible. It not only looks unnatural, it also makes it easy to spot for Google’s black hat fish net.
Ninja/Hidden Links and Keywords
These types of links and keywords are completely invisible to the web surfer but are visible to search engine eyes. A common way to make use of this is to use text color that matches the background color, making these words completely invisible to a person browsing the website. Even if you don’t see these “keywords” the search engine will still use them to rank the website.
Shady Redirects and Cloaking
This technique tries to pull the wool on top of search engine’s eyes by presenting a certain topic to them but then redirecting a web surfer to another unrelated website. Imagine searching for an article about pet food and finding the perfect site but then get a website leading to body building supplements. This is what cloaking is in a nutshell.
The main difference between shady redirects and cloaking is that shady redirects send the search engine spiders to the correct website for the link while redirecting web surfers to the wrong one.
Plagiarized Content
This is probably the most obvious black hat technique out there and not just for SEO. Search engines prioritize listing unique content over content copied over from other sites. And no, rewording something with synonyms won’t cut it as Google can detect these.
Black Hat SEO does at times get your site to the top of the search rankings, however it is very short lived as Google sweeps through content constantly. It’s not just AI that sweeps for black hat content either as Google employees can manually impose sanctions if their spiders don’t detect your website.
If you want to be successful in the long term, start using white hat techniques that are not only effective but also keep you in the good graces of Google.
