What is Black Hat SEO?
The world of online marketing has only grown over the years, with brands and businesses needing to improve how they market to their consumers and remain relevant when it comes to online presence. Through the development of online brands and businesses, SEO techniques have had to become sharper, smarter and more capable of ensuring rankings! Many brands and businesses feel that they do not have the time to implement SEO techniques and work their way up the search engines results page slowly, so they take to doing unethical practices that they think will increase the rate at which SEO helps to improve rankings. As SEO becomes a more effective way of drawing customers in and more and more companies start developing practices and techniques that help them to rank above their competitors, it is important to recognise that not all SEO techniques and practices will have a positive impact on your website.
Black hat SEO techniques refer to tactics that may lead you to gain higher rankings quickly but are not considered to be beneficial towards the health and longevity of your SEO or your website. These techniques often go against search engine guidelines and though you may see a rise in rankings to begin with, this will not last, and you may be penalised as search engines crawl and pick up on issues within your website. Search engines have only gotten smarter as black hat SEO has gotten more common, and though you can use techniques that may help in the short run, long term issues will crop up and cause your rankings to lower and search engines to not trust your website. Gaining and keeping the trust of search engines is the only way to ensure that your high rankings will remain high, so black hat SEO techniques are actually detrimental to your website’s SEO.
What Are The Reasons To Avoid Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO can be extremely detrimental to the visibility of your website and the rankings that it gets on search engine results pages. As your rankings lower and your web page becomes less visible, you will receive less and less traffic to your webpage, as search engines do not trust your content. This can negatively impact sales and leave you with little to no chance of regaining your authority back.
Why is Black Hat SEO Harmful?
- Results are short term: Though you may see an initial rise in your ranking on search engine results pages, this rise is a short term effect and search engines are likely to pick up on the tactics you are using. Once a search engine has registered that you are using black hat SEO techniques, it will impact your ranking and authority, both of which will be extremely hard to get back. The trust that a search engine has in your website only goes as far as the practices that you use, and like in most areas of life, trust is extremely hard to get back once it is lost.
- User experience is harmed: Using black hat SEO techniques may seem like a good idea at first, but when the actual content is created and the black hat SEO strategies implemented, the user experience suffers. Things like low-quality content, keyword stuffing and other black hat SEO techniques negatively impact the experience of the user, making it hard to enjoy your content and understand the relevance that it has to their search query. If you do get visitors to your webpage, they will likely leave the page very soon after having arrived and are far less likely to make any sort of purchase as your content and website look spammy.
What are The Black Hat SEO Techniques?
If you are thinking about what black hat SEO is and about how you may be responsible for trying to embellish a bit of content with SEO techniques to quicken the rate at which your webpage rises in rankings, it is important to understand the techniques responsible for causing these issues. The following are just a few of the most common black hat techniques and how to do black hat SEO.
Publishing a Bunch of Low-Quality Content
One of the ways in which content creators attempt to improve their rankings quickly is through the creation and posting of low-quality content on their web pages. Low-quality content is cheap and easy to create, but the mistakes within the content will lead to lower rankings, as search engines can see when content is not of high quality. One of the most commonly used techniques that website owners will do is to copy content from another page directly to their own. While in previous years, search engines were not great at picking up on duplicated content, they now have a ton of different ways that they monitor the replication of content across different websites and they can even note which website was the one to copy the content. Instead of posting quick, cheap and duplicated content, it is important that webpages put the very best content on their web pages, designed by content creators and writers who use relevant and informative data.
Keyword Stuffing
Keywords make up an important part of SEO, and having keywords that tell a search engine what web pages are about can help them to rank you better in the search engines results pages. Keyword stuffing refers to a black hat SEO technique whereby marketers and content creators stuff their web pages with irrelevant and overused keywords, creating content that is almost nonsensical. This manipulative technique is picked up on by search engines, as the unnatural way of speaking and repetition can be spotted by the crawlers who are indexing your webpage. The following is a keyword stuffing black hat SEO example that can display how this technique can negatively impact the quality of your content
“Fruit Vendors Galore is a fruit vendor that aims to sell you the highest quality fruit, as one of the top fruit vendors in London. When it comes to fruit vendors, there is not better fruit vendor than Fruit Vendors Galore”
The above display shows how keyword stuffing works, as within these 41 words, the word ‘Fruit vendor’ appears a total of 6 times! While this may seem like a good way to increase the number of times that a keyword is repeated, search engines have developed tools to pick up on these inconsistencies and will penalise you heavily for it.
Link Buying
Link buying is a common practice that website owners do to quickly increase their authority, in the hopes that this will improve their ranking on search engine results pages. This is a typical black hat SEO practice that will negatively impact you in the long run. Search engines are able to determine which links have been bought and according to Google, this is not a tactic that is allowed when it comes to SEO improvements. Links should be built on the basis of relevance as opposed to purchasing power, which is why link buying is not a strategy that is allowed by search engines. To ensure that you are not taking part in any black hat SEO practices, make sure that you are earning your links and not just buying them.
Comment Spam
Getting links to your website out there to attract more users and customers is a common way that people try to generate more traffic and improve their SEO. In the past, many people have tried to get their content out there by posting links to their web pages in the comment sections of videos, blog posts and any other comment space where people may come across and click on a link. This is referred to as comment spam and it is associated with a black hat SEO technique. Very often, the comments are spammed through automated bots and they can be extremely annoying, both to users and those who are posting the blogs or social media posts. There are different tools that you can use to ensure that your content cannot be spammed through the comments and it is important that you use these tools to avoid this happening.
What Are The Alternatives of Black Hat SEO to Improve Results?
If you are looking for the fastest results but are hoping not to use any black hat SEO techniques to get them, it is possible to use a variety of other techniques that will not harm your SEO, to improve your rankings. The following are just a few of the alternatives of black hat SEO to improve ranking on search engine results pages.
Be Mobile-Friendly
Being a mobile-friendly website will ensure that your rankings improve on search engine results pages. As the use of mobile devices has increased over the last few years, the optimization of your webpage should be set in a way whereby a visit from a mobile device will still reflect high-quality content. the size of images and text, the links that use and more all need to be able to be used on PC as well as mobile devices. Web pages that are optimised for mobile use are often ranked higher on search engine results pages as it shows search engines that you are working to improve the quality of your webpage.
Be Creative in the selection of keywords
The keywords you use greatly impact your SEO and having a wide variety of different keywords that you can rank for greatly improves your chances of being ranked highly. Using different kinds of keywords and surveying the related searches that you could potentially rank for can help to increase your visibility and the amount of traffic that makes its way to your webpage.
Invest in Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are short snippets that appear on search engine results pages, below the link to your website. These descriptions give users an idea of what they will find on your webpage and how this information can help to answer their search query. Investing in high-quality meta descriptions will ensure that you rank highly.
How to Report Black Hat SEO?
If you are a website owner who has taken the time to engage and invest in the appropriate tactics to ensure that you are not using black hat SEO practices, it may be disconcerting to see spammy websites that are using these techniques ranking above you on search engine results pages. If you have noticed a spammy website that is using black hat SEO tactics to rank highly, it is possible to report these issues so that search engine crawlers may go and review these pages again and check for any issues. Google has a webspam reporting tool that allows for you to make and file a report against spammy websites, and Google will go and search through this website and see if they can pick up on any kinds of issues relating to black hat SEO practises.
Another aspect that may be irking you when it comes to these kinds of practices is when a spammy webpage that is of low-quality links to yours. When this happens, it is possible to disavow these links so that they are no longer attached to your webpage. It is important that you monitor your links as they are used to reflect on the quality and reliability of your own content.
How Markethinkers Can Help You to Avoid Black Hat SEO?
Marketheinkers is a marketing agency that can help you with any and all SEO issues and queries. With so many different blackhat SEO issues and techniques that arise when creating content, it is important that you have a team behind you that fully understands these issues and has strategies to solve them as quickly as possible. Here at Markethinkers, we are capable of being your built-in black hat SEO checker, with the right tools and skills to ensure that you are not unknowingly committing any black hat issues within your content. With our SEO copywriting and professional SEO consulting team of experts behind you, you can be sure that the content that you are creating and publishing is fully functioning and recognised as high-quality data by search engines.
