Websites would go a great deal to get a better rank for themselves in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). There is a lot of competition to get better rankings and stay relevant. It is the only way a website can ensure traffic and realize more revenues.
This being a competition, competitors adapt a lot of ways to stay ahead of their nearest competition. This may involve fair and ethical ways or may involve unfair means. To know more deeply about the Black Hat SEO Techniques, keep reading this article till the end, you guy going to learn much more about these Black hat SEO Techniques.
The unfair means are referred to as Black hat SEO techniques. Use of fair means and abiding by all rules, then obviously can be called White-hat techniques in SEO.
White hat SEO techniques take time to build rank and organic traffic for a website, while on the other hand, Black hat SEO techniques can boost the website’s ranking, visibility, and traffic in a short time.
Black hat SEO techniques though may boost a website’s prospects but involve considerable risk as Search Engines constantly lookout to penalize actions taken under such techniques.
White-hat SEO techniques are simply every SEO effort that is done ethically following a search engine’s ranking guidelines. Keyword research, use of proper Meta tags, internal linking, good quality content, etc. are the things that comprise White-hat SEO techniques. Black hat SEO techniques, don’t strictly follow the things mentioned in White-hat techniques.
These techniques are manipulative, deceptive, and violate search engine ranking guidelines and conventions and try to outsmart or bypass or overlook them.
There are many black-hat SEO techniques, some of the prominent ones are mentioned below. These black-hat SEO techniques should be avoided to the best of effort.
- Cloaking
Cloaking involves cheating web crawlers and users. Websites show the version of content to users, but when search engine crawlers visit such sites, they are shown an entirely different version of the page. This is done to distort rankings in SERPs. Even if the content on a page is irrelevant, cloaking would make such pages rank better as web crawlers have been deceived.
For instance, a user may search for “black shoes” and gets a link on the SERP to a particular site that claims to sell affordable shoes.
But when he clicks this link on the SERP, he is directed to a landing page that has nothing to do with shoes; this landing page may be a spammy page asking the user to download a game. Search Engine penalizes such a website by de-indexing and de-ranking them or blacklisting them altogether from SERPs.
Content created to suit the needs of the category of users is called tailoring and is an acceptable practice. Here, the search engine and users see the same version of the page in SERPs. As long as the search engine is not deceived for indexing purposes and users see the same version of the page as the search engine, it is not cloaking.
- Poor Quality Content
Creating shallow content or content which is irrelevant or adds little value to a searching user is also a very common black hat SEO technique.
This includes the practices of content scraping (content copied from original websites without any permission), duplicate content (almost the same content on various pages of the same website with a very little variation on each page), content farming (creating a large number of low-quality pages to cover a vast variety of search terms in order to gain rankings on SERPs), low-quality user-generated content, thin content (pages with mostly irrelevant content contained in a few lines), etc.
For instance, a website offering services in home decoration has the same content on each of its pages for different cities (where it offers its services). The web pages have the name of the city changed with almost other content remaining the same. This amounts to duplicate content. Such websites are likely to be ranked lower or penalized by the search engine.
Writing Original and high-quality content is important as it helps to build a website reputation, authority, and credibility in the eyes of users and search engines. Good quality content, over a period, helps in maintaining a fair amount of traffic thereby increasing business prospects and revenue earned. Such efforts are part of White-hat SEO.
- Keyword Stuffing
Keyword Stuffing is the practice to fill up pages with keywords so that a search engine would place the page higher in SERPs assuming the page is relevant to the search query entered by a user.
Webmasters try to place strategically important keywords all over a webpage with the hope to garner higher rankings in SERPs. But this practice actually decreases a page’s readability, it may make the page’s content look unnatural, its relevance, and might be penalized by the search engine.
An example of a stuffed keyword (which should be avoided) is: “XYZ website serves your need to write content.
We write content for a variety of topics. We know how to write content that can be original. Our experts write content so that your page stays relevant with the help of our written content.” Here, “write content” is the keyword that has been stuffed. Writing such content should be avoided at any cost as they hinder readability and makes a poor impression.
- Hidden keywords
Sometimes websites hide words from the users by making them of the same color as the background. This way a user still sees the content which makes sense to them. While such words are invisible to the user, they are visible to the crawlers. Crawlers would be able to find those invisible keywords and rank a page higher up. Such sneaky ways to gain rank would ultimately be found out and penalized by the search engine.
For instance, a website selling a car may have the following content, but with the text written in red hidden from (or invisible to) users. “XYZ the best car in 1500 cc category with power braking and ultimate comfort; with extra broad tires to have an additional grip and better shock absorbers to make your ride smooth. Best car in 1500 cc category.
Best car for a price range of Rs. 4 lakh onwards. Best car with zero interest rate available in EMI.”
- Clickbait
There are a lot of websites that use tempting names or sentences in their advertised links or links which appear in SERPs. These websites or pages have titles or thumbnails which makes a user really curious to tempt him to at least have a peek. The user in his curiosity to explore the alluring topic clicks the link.
This increases a website’s traffic and thereby its rankings. But once, the user realizes that nothing special or interesting was encountered while they visited the page, they close it. This increases the bounce rates and reduces session duration thereby harming the website’s authority.
For instance, a clickbait like, “Do you really want to know what happens after death? We have RIGHT the answers for you.” is almost certain to attract a lot of clicks. But once the user reads the content he may be disappointed. Avoid such clickbait(s) which are false or show irrelevant content to that promised in the link or advertisement.
However, genuine and relevant content on a clickbait topic can be a good thing and might not fall under black hat SEO techniques. E.g. “Know how to increase your page’s traffic by these 10 impeccable tricks”.
- Link Buying
Backlinks are one of the ways to rank better. Inbound links from trusted sites that hold authority in their field can increase a website’s credibility. Such links are usually earned over a period as the website’s traffic and reputation grow organically. However, websites may resort to purchasing such links.
They may be purchasing links from other pages that might not even be relevant to the concerned website or those pages might have spammy content. The links might also be exchanged as a favor to show their links on our website.
For instance, a website dealing with sports gear might buy links from well-established book-selling websites. In such a case, the backlink to the sports gear website from the book-selling website appears suspicious, unnatural, and irrelevant.
If a website has such links then it harms the website’s credibility and backlink quality. As a result, the website suffers in rankings and authority. So, it is better to avoid link buybacks. Adopt white-hat link-building techniques such as guest posting, forum posting, etc. to build natural inbound links to a website.
- Spamming techniques
Spam is a big no for Search Engines. Spam websites and content is most likely to be penalized by Google or other search engines. Spamming may include spam blogs or comments. Blog spam includes automatically posting links as comments on blogs to increase the number of inbound links to a website.
Avoid such a thing; most creative, relevant, and value-adding comments so as not to appear suspicious. For instance, “Great Going! Have a look at this amazing website which will satisfy your curiosity to earn money easily.” The underlined portion is a link to the website. Such tactics might be considered spam techniques and search engines might penalize such websites that host such spam comments by reducing their rank.
- Negative SEO Techniques
Negative SEO techniques involve sabotaging a competitor’s website ranking by making it look like they are involved in malpractices to boost their SERP rankings. In other words, negative SEO makes it appear as if one’s competitor is involved in using the black hat SEO techniques while the reality may be that the competitor might be playing it fairly.
The goal of such techniques is to get a competitor’s website penalized by search engines and hence reducing their rankings. Another black hat SEO technique to stay ahead of one’s competitor is by reporting it to the search engine that one’s competitor is involved in the black hat SEO techniques.
For instance, the Negative SEO technique involves taking a website’s original content and then reposting its duplicate on many pages. To search engines it might appear that our website is hosting duplicate content.
Spammers, through various techniques, make this quite convincing for search engines that our original content was in fact copied or duplicated, and hence there are chances that our website is penalized.
The above-mentioned Black Hat SEO Techniques are not exhaustive. However, the example and explanations mentioned, if followed can save a lot of trouble to the webmasters. Following white-hat SEO techniques is the way forward. There is no alternative to honest and patient hard work; is there?
