The digital space is saturated with millions of websites offering similar services and content. Competition is rife, and it is easy for websites to get lost during organic searches. Getting your website to rank for targeted keywords in SERPs is now more vital than ever.
Why?
It’s a surefire way to attract traffic from your potential audience, increasing leads, boosting conversions, and even improving your bottom line – especially for ecommerce businesses. This drive to outrank millions of other websites has resorted to black hat SEO techniques. You may have heard about it or may have practiced it unknowingly.
As a website owner or digital marketer, you should be aware of the dangers of this practice. This article looks at black hat SEO in detail, its examples, and why you should avoid it.
What Is Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is a simple tactic, technique, and practice deployed to rank a website higher in search results by violating search engine guidelines. These techniques are deployed to manipulate search engine algorithms into ranking them in organic searches.
This begs the question: if people know that black hat SEO techniques violate search engine guidelines, why do they still do it?
Some digital marketers do this knowing they can get instant campaign results. But search engines are evolving and deploying constant updates to spot these violations and penalize the websites involved.
Google and Bing frown upon these unethical SEO tricks, as their search results have become user-friendly.
Black Hat SEO vs. White Hat SEO
Getting your website ranked in search results can be exhausting, as other websites are doing the same. Thus, digital marketers implement different tactics to rank for specific keywords. These techniques are divided into two main categories: White hat SEO and black hat SEO.
From the previous section, you can deduce that black hat SEO goes against search engine’s guidelines and code of conduct.
However, white hat SEO implements strategies that are not in violation of the search engine guideline. Thus, white hat SEO focuses on on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO to improve website rankings during organic searches.
The endgame of black hat SEO is to get instant results. This problem is that search engine algorithms monitor their platforms to spot these violations. And these websites will get flagged and penalized.
It’s a different ball game with ethical SEO. Its results are lasting, and the website will not be penalized. Organic SEO techniques include link building, backlinking, meta-tag optimization, user-friendliness, mobile usability, and many more.
Why Should You Avoid Black Hat SEO?
To rank your website, it is essential to desist from implementing black hat SEO. It goes against Google Search Essentials (formerly Webmaster Guidelines), and your website will face the following:
● It will affect your search rankings. One of the reasons not to use black hat SEO is that it will negatively impact your search rankings. This invariably affects your search visibility, triggering a depletion in your traffic and conversions.
● It will negatively impact your bottom line. Your cash flow and bottom line will be affected when your website has been flagged for black hat SEO. If fewer people see your pages from search results, fewer people will fulfill your website’s objectives.
● No long-term results. Another obvious demerit to unethical SEO techniques is that they aren’t long-term. You may enjoy instant results, but your website will be penalized once a manual review is conducted or the current algorithm is updated. For your digital campaigns to be successful, you need to do away with black hat SEO techniques.
● Poor user experience. One of the factors search engines prioritize for ranking pages is user experience. They want to provide users with relevant results that satisfy their search intent. Black hat SEO doesn’t care about providing users with relevant content. It only focuses on tricking search engines. Thus, users will be disinterested and leave your website, increasing your bounce rate.
Examples of Black Hat SEO
If you just created your website and are new to this SEO thing, you may not know which technique to use and avoid. Your website will be flagged and penalized if you’re not following the right technique.
The more you learn about black hat SEO techniques, the more you can avoid them. Black-hat SEO practices include the following except:
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the process of repeating the main target keyword(s) throughout your web content. Most people think inserting the keywords repeatedly will trick search engines into ranking the web page. But the reverse is often the case.
Search engines are designed to provide users with relevant content. So, when your web pages are loaded with keyword stuffing, your website will be removed from search results.
Below is a typical example of a website that implements keyword stuffing:
We sell children’s toys. Our website features a wide selection of children’s toys for children of all ages. These children’s toys are not only stylish but colorful. The children’s toys come in different sizes. Visit our website and order children’s toys today.
The keyword ‘children’s toys’ is abused in the passage above, making it repetitive and redundant.
Cloaking
Cloaking Google pages is also another black hat SEO tactic. It involves providing different web content or URLs to users and search engines different from the meta title. Thus, when users click on such links, it reveals content that is not the user intent.
Cloaking is a deceptive tactic to trick search engines and users. Thus, your meta tags, URL, and content should be consistent.
Paid/Manipulative Links
Backlinking from other authority websites is an essential factor for ranking websites. However, some people deploy black hat link building to trick search engines. It involves paying other websites to give you a mention.
This disrupts the entire aim of SEO, which is to build trust with users. Some of these link manipulations include:
● Blog comment spam.
● Forum spam.
● Automated link building.
● Paid links.
● Spam directories
Google and Bing frown at these black hat SEO strategies.
Sneaky Redirects
Redirects are crucial in building a thriving website, especially for ecommerce businesses. However, sneaky redirects are in violation of the guidelines of search engines.
Here, users click on a link based on the meta title and description. However, the link redirects them to another web page different from what they expect.
Link Farms
Link farms are deceptive SEO tactics that you should avoid. It is a website or group of websites created to improve another website’s backlink. Thus, you may see websites that cut across different niche shares suspecting links to another website. Some digital marketers use blackhat affiliate marketing to promote other websites.
You should be wary of digital marketing services that promise to improve your backlinks, as they may be link farms.
Abusing Structured Data/Rich Snippets
Rich snippets help users access quick information without clicking on any web link. These snippets are curated from websites from search engines through structured data.
Some people have taken advantage of rich snippets and other SERPs features to display inaccurate information to trick users. Examples include writing fake reviews to improve a web service.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO is a deceptive trick some websites implement to trample their competitor’s ranking positions on SERPs. It typically involves directing massive unnatural links to their domain so that Google will spot them and penalize them.
It is not a common practice; however, you should not be involved.
Hidden Text or Links
This is the process of hiding texts or links inside a web page using the same background color as the font color.
Some marketers use this black hat SEO technique to stuff keywords and trick search engines simultaneously.
How to Report Black Hat SEO
What do you do if you notice your competitors are incorporating black hat SEO for their campaigns?
You can file a spam report with Google and state the nature of the deceptive technique used. Immediate action will not be taken, but you will be updated as soon as they review the website.
Conclusion
Black hat SEO is a deceptive tactic with several pitfalls for a website. You should try your best to avoid these tactics entirely. Contact a professional and trustworthy digital marketing company if you want to incorporate white hat SEO for your website but don’t know how to pull it off.
Abstrax Web is an innovative and premium digital marketing agency helping brands boost their SEO performance. Our specialized services include website design and development, content marketing, on-page SEO, wireframing, keyword optimization, and many more.
Reach out to us to see how we can help your business.