Black Hat SEO Is Not A Magic Trick

Unless you are part of the digital marketing world, we are pretty sure that you might not have come across the term Black Hat SEO, which is why we believe it is essential to talk about it. 

We would love to sit here and say that it is a magic trick to get you onto the first page of Google when anyone searches a query for your business, but sadly, it’s not! Black hat SEO is a set of practices used to increase a site or page rankings through means that violate the search engine’s terms of service. 

If you get caught doing black hat SEO, it’s like your site has been put in Google jail because you are wrongly placing it on the search engine results page. 

These Black Hat SEO techniques can penalise your website, rank in a lower position on Google and decline organic traffic. So we are here to explain what you should be avoiding when it comes to your SEO strategy.  

Keyword Stuffing 

This refers to a webpage being stuffed with keywords and numbers to manipulate your site’s Google rankings. 

Keyword stuffing often appears in a list or a group of irrelevant and multiple variations of words that sound broken and unnatural. They don’t usually perform a sentence, but you can find them written in paragraphs of text that appear too persuasive. 

This technique can result in your site appearing in irrelevant search queries. Keyword stuffing is pretty easy to spot too. If every other word is something related to your business, to the point where your sentence doesn’t actually make sense, you’ve probably stuffed your keywords. Keywords in your text should be placed where they most naturally flow. 

Cloaking

Cloaking is the practice of presenting different information or URLs to users and search engines. For example, the links in spam emails will likely be a form of cloaking as it is being advertised as something that it isn’t. Users often expect different results. 

Let’s remember that tailoring your content for different users is still acceptable. You might decide to change a few features of your website to make it mobile-friendly or change the language of the page depending on where the user is viewing the content. These are still okay; however, changing the content that appears in search results is not. 

If your site is hacked, the hacker will likely use cloaking to make it harder for the site owner to detect.

Poor Quality Content 

Several techniques fall under poor quality content; however, the one that we are most surprised by is hidden text. 

Hidden text tends to include keyword stuffing. It is pieces of text that search engines can crawl through but users can’t see it as it is usually the same colour as the background of the website. This kind of black hat technique can introduce extra or irrelevant keywords to boost the site’s rankings across more search terms. 

We aren’t just talking about a paragraph of text on the About page on a website, either. Hidden text could come in the form of a published guest post, a commenting system that fails to pick it up, hackers or an authorised user could have copied and pasted some text with CSS styling that causes it to be hidden. 

There are some circumstances when hidden text is okay to use, such as alt-text for images. Search engines can read this but also describe the images for people who use screen readers and turn off images on mobile sites. 

But it doesn’t stop there. 

Poor quality content is content that has no value to the user’s search query. This can include content copied from another website and duplicated via a bot or a person. It can also involve creating content on a subject you want to rank and swapping the content out for something different once it is high in the results. 

It is important to write original pieces of content that are relevant and up-to-date on your website. We’ve spoken about this before, but it allows users to build trust and turn them into customers. 

Spam Comments

It is crucial to monitor your comments and delete irrelevant ones that don’t add to your content. Instagram bots are a classic example of spam bots. 

Do you know when you post a picture and immediately get a comment asking you to drop a particular user a DM? Well, those are the types of comments that we are talking about. 

Search engines can remove pages containing lots of spam comments from the results page. It would help if you prevented this practice by using anti-spam tools like a reCAPTCHA to minimise the risk of spam comments appearing. 

Links 

Don’t get us wrong, we love a good link to our website, but there are some that you should be avoiding. 

Link farms are a collection of sites with no purpose other than building their search engine rankings. These links tend to have keywords they want to use to rank the site higher in the anchor text. Instead, create content regularly, build any backlinks through honest outreach, and build relationships with customers who can promote your website. 

Similarly, paid links are another Black Hat SEO technique to be avoided. Google can crawl through links and track what ones could have been bought and those that have occurred naturally. 

So now we understand that black hat SEO techniques pose a threat to your site’s rankings; let’s paint it white. If you need some help with your SEO strategy, feel free to drop us a line! In the long run, you can concentrate on running your business and bringing in profit, and we can take care of the good stuff.