Black SEO is an illegal practice which is against the guidelines of search engines, employed to help a website get appearing higher on search engine results. These illegal methods don’t solve the problem the problem for the user, and can result in penalties by search engine. Black-hat methods comprise keyword stuffing, using cloaking and making use of the private network of link exchanges.
Black Hat
Search engine optimization is crucial for growth of a business However, there’s a proper and wrong method of SEO. The black hat technique of SEO is not the right way. Black black SEO attempts to manipulate the algorithms of search engines, rather than addressing the needs of the user. Instead of gaining the right to be highly ranked on search results pages, black SEO is black SEO employs devious methods to achieve this goal. If you continue to use techniques that are not legal will likely harm your search engine ranking rather than enhance it.
Make your website more effective with SEO that is technical. Begin by conducting this review.
If you’re brand new to the world of search The purpose of search engines such as Google is to offer the best results for users when they does a search. They want users to enjoy a an enjoyable experience when searching and to ensure that the results they give don’t contain spam. They accomplish this by using automated algorithms or manual processes which aim to identify and punish those who engage in black-hat SEO.
Search engine algorithms have become more sophisticated with time. This is the reason you should stay clear of the black hat SEO method at all the cost. White hat SEO is superior method for the search engine optimization. It’s a more ethical method that is in line with the terms and guidelines of search engines. White hat SEO involves producing high-quality content and an overall better user experience for those who visit your website.
Black Hat SEO contrasts with. White Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is a violation of the guidelines of search engines, and alters their algorithms to achieve better rankings. It could lead to being completely removed from search results or getting an inferior position. White white hat SEO is an responsible method of SEO through the creation of quality content and offering a great user experience.
This article will provide an explanation of the black hat SEO techniques are, so you’ll know how that you do not use them when developing your SEO strategy.
Black Hat Techniques in SEO
Keyword Stuffing:
Keyword stuffing is the method of filling a page with keywords that are not relevant in a bid to alter the way your website ranks on search result pages. By using multiple variants of keywords without adding worth creates a negative experience for the user. It could result in your site being unable to be ranked for irrelevant searches.
Google describes keyword stuffing as:
Phone numbers that are not listed without any significant added value.
Text blocks that list cities and states that a web page is attempting to be ranked for
Repeating the exact words or phrases repeatedly enough to make it sound like it is not natural.
This is an illustration of the use of keywords on an online store selling products for outbound marketing:
“We sell outbound software for marketing. Our software for marketing outbound is exactly what we offer. If you’re thinking about buying outbound marketing software, contact one of our consultants for outbound marketing software.”
I’m sure you’ll agree that’s like an unfinished record. It’s fairly easy to identify in the first place. Google is able to detect that the tone of the music is not natural.
You might have heard the comedy “an SEO copywriter walks into the bar, grill or pub, Irish, bartender, drinks, wine, beer and liquor “. This is a joke about keyword stuffing, and it is a great example of this practice. The words are similar to each other, however they’re of no use because they aren’t linked together in the words in a sentence.
Keyword research can be conducted to determine what people are looking for However, using these keywords too often in your content isn’t the best idea. Instead of overfilling your content with irrelevant keywords, you should focus on creating content that is focused on the topic that are more relevant than keyword.
Cloaking:
Cloaking is the process of showing one type of information to the user, and another item to the search engine. Websites who practice black hat SEO may use this technique to rank their content for various terms that are not relevant in relation to the content. The majority of spam websites use this technique to stop a search engine in identifying the content that they offer to their users.
The ability to tailor your content to various types of users is ok. For instance, you could reduce the dimensions of your site for visitors who are using an mobile device. It is also possible to alter the language of your webpage based on the country the user is from. Publishers like Forbes or Inc might change the advertisements that are displayed on the page to pay for their content. These are examples that are totally acceptable. So long as you’re not merely altering the content displayed for crawlers of search engines.
Although there’s no hard and fast rule that can be used to decide what is acceptable and what’s not, my suggestion is to consider asking yourself: is what you’re planning to accomplish solve the problem of the user? If yes, then it’s okay. You must treat the search engine bots who browse your site in the same way as other users.
If you’re interested to learn more about what Google perceives your site, you can make use of the fetch as a Google tool to evaluate this to what the users see.
Sneaky Redirects:
A redirect is the process of sending users to a different URL than the one they originally clicked. A black-hat SEO employs redirects in ways that go beyond the reason they were created to serve. In the same way as the term “cloaking,” this could mean redirecting a crawler of a search engine to a specific page, and everyone else to a different page.
Another way to do this is redirecting an reliable website that has a large number of backlinks to another unrelated site, in order to increase its ranking on search engine results. A 301 redirect transfers most of the authority from one site to a different one. That means that someone who is practicing illegal SEO may use redirects only to manipulate search results.
Redirects should be only employed for the purposes they were intended for. This is in the event that you change websites’ domains or consolidate two content pieces. It is also possible to make use of JavaScript in order to redirect visitors to other sites on certain instances. For instance, LinkedIn redirecting you to your full profile once you login instead of showing your public profile of a user’s profile when you log out. These types of redirects, on contrary, must be avoided. They are in violation of the rules of search engines, such as Google.
Poor Quality Content:
Content that is of poor quality and has no value to the user is also a standard procedure in black hat SEO. This can include content that has been scraped from other websites, either by a bot, or a individual. At a time, search engines such as Google were not able to recognize the content taken from websites. In 2011, the Google Panda update of 2011 fixed this issue. Numerous websites that had duplicate content were hit with an immediate hit in ranking in search results. Since the time, Google has gotten much more adept at identifying duplicate content and low-quality content.
Incorporating invisible keywords into your site is prohibited. Some websites that practice SEO that is black-hat by making their text color the same as the background. This is why the site may be displayed in search results for these keywords invisible to the user but there’s nothing visible related to them. When a user clicks the result hoping it’s about the topic they’re searching for, they aren’t able to find any of the information they’re looking for since the keywords are hidden. If you’re addressing the customer, there’s no reason for you to hide content on your site.
“bait and Switch “bait and switch” is another method of deceiving search engines. It involves creating content around the subject you wish to be ranked for. After the page has been placed in search results for the area, the content will be replaced with something different. This results in an unfavorable experience for those searching because the page they clicked to view is no longer available. These techniques deceive users as well as search engines, which is not the best way to conduct SEO.
Writing quality, original content is an essential part of SEO that is white hat. It is not only necessary to avoid penalties from search engines but it can also set your site apart. The creation of high-quality content increases confidence with your intended customers and transforms visitors to customers.
Paid Links:
Search engines such as Google strictly prohibit the purchasing as well as selling links. On their site, they state they state that “any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.” This could include sending an online site free products in exchange for hyperlinks. If you’re unsure of what is considered a reasonable exchange Matt Cutts, the former director of Google’s Webspam team, recommends studying FTC guidelines.
Avoid the practice of paying another site to promote your content. Google wants users to inform them about instances where people are selling or buying links. They claim they will penalize both the seller and buyer of links if the act is discovered.
Should you be and have bought links, without knowing that it’s a black-hat SEO practice, you need to get them removed as quickly as you can. It is also possible to employ the tool to remove links when you’re unable to get webmasters to delete the links. This informs Google to ignore paid links when it calculates your Page rank.
Abusing Structured Data/Rich Snippets:
Structured data can also be referred to as rich snippets or schema. It lets you alter the way your content appears on search results pages. It helps it standout from other sites and gives you more space on results pages. It is possible to add structured data to a page that displays the contents of a recipe, podcast or book, among other services and products. Review schema markups are likely among the more well-known kinds of data that is structured.
Black hat SEO consists of using inaccurate data using structured data in order to confuse the search engine and user. For example, a person who is using black hat SEO could award themselves five stars on an untrusted review site and include structured data so they are able to stand out in the search result pages. This is a dangerous method since search engines such as Google urge customers to complain about sites that are using structured data.
This shouldn’t stop you from off marking up honest exact information on your websites. Indeed, I strongly recommend adding structured data in the white-hat method.
You don’t have anything to worry about, as long as you provide honest information that is beneficial for users. Google has outlined the guidelines regarding the inclusion of structured data on your site. They also have an excellent tool to test any structured information.
Blog Comment Spam:
The name suggests that this technique is black-hat and involves the inclusion of links to your site on blog posts. This is less frequent in the present, as search engines like Google changed their algorithms to remove links from blog comments. The most authoritative blogs are now making hyperlinks in blog comments nofollow by default. This means that search engines such as Google do not use the link, nor does the link have any authority.
Despite the drop in the number of users using the technique however, there’s still many people using Fiverr offering blog commenting services. Blog commenting that includes hyperlinks to your site, is an unprofessional method of gaining websites to link to and we strongly suggest avoiding this method.
If you manage an online publication or forum which allows comments, you have to be careful to ensure that your comment section won’t be targeted by bots or humans. Search engines such as Google can either degrade or eliminate spam-related pages from results. Utilizing anti-spam software like Google’s reCAPTCHA tool, which is free, is one method to reduce the danger of spam-user created content.
Link Farms:
A link farm is website or a group of websites designed to aid in linking building. Every website has a link to the website or websites they hope to rank higher in search engines. Google ranks websites based on analysing the number of hyperlinks which point to the site in addition to other factors. The black hat SEO exploits this by making use of link farms to increase how many backlinks that a specific website has.
Link farms typically have poor-quality material and many hyperlinks. They usually contain the keyword they wish to rank the website within the text of their anchor. Search engines such as Google can quickly detect link farms, and their use is a bad idea. It is better to employ techniques that are white-hat SEO, such as producing amazing graphs, content and data, as well as interviews or any other material which allows you to gain natural backlinks over time.
Private Blog Networks:
Private blog networks (PBN) can be described as a group of trusted websites primarily used to build links. Similar to link farms as they all aim to boost the number of links that link to a site. Each PBN site is linked to the website they wish to rank higher in results of a search, but they do not connect to one another.
SEOs with black hats looking to create an private network typically purchase domains that are expired and have already earned credibility. They’ll create content that is like the ones that were already published on the domain prior to it being expired, and then add hyperlinks to their own website. They’re hoping that search engines don’t realize that they’re governing a collection of websites and will rank their main site much more prominently in the results of search.
The search engines have become adept in finding PBNs and your website may be subject to an extremely severe penalty when you use PBNs to increase the visibility of your site in search. Instead of creating fake websites, focus on producing quality content under the domain of your site. The fact that your content is kept under one roof means that your website will be a highly trusted one because everyone will link to one site.
Examples of Black Hat SEO
Groupon’s Bait and Switch
Groupon is accused of executing an act of bait and switch by San Francisco Comprehensive Tours. The tour operator conducted promotional campaign in conjunction with Groupon however the voucher site continued to promote the promotion on Google for a long time after the promotion had been ended. If users clicked on the Groupon’s website, it was clear that there wasn’t a discount offered since the content had been changed. The bait and switch was a common feature in the form of a PPC advertisement, but they can occur in organic results, too.
J.C. Penney’s Black Hat Links
J.C. Penney ranked at the top of results for a wide range of search terms, ranging that range from “skinny jeans” to “home decor”. The store’s outstanding performance in the search results was precisely timed to coincide with the time of the year when Christmas is upon us. The impressive performance in search results was due to black-hat SEO link building methods that were omitted from Google’s radar.
More than 22,000 backlinks were found in the hands of Doug Pierce. These backlinks contained anchor text that contained the exact words J.C. Penney wanted to be ranked for in search engines. A majority of these hyperlinks were on websites that were not relevant with J.C. Penney. The subjects of these sites ranged from gambling to cars. J.C. Penney claimed no liability for the hyperlinks which were discovered when it was interviewed by New York Times.
Google confirmed that the actions taken by J.C. Penney went against their webmaster guidelines. Google also disclosed that they had also violated the webmaster guidelines on three occasions. J.C. Penney received a Google penalty which caused them to fall to around 70 places on Google for keywords like “living room furniture.”
Sprint’s User Generated Spam
In 2013, a user named Redleg x3 made a post in Google’s Webmaster Central forum to explain how Sprint received a notice from Google alerting them to spam generated by users on their site. The Google’s Matt Cutts commented on the thread, saying he could see that the majority of spam was taken off the site. The company’s spokesperson said that they should “…try to remove the spam a bit more quickly or determine if there are ways to make it little more difficult for spammers to put up a massive number of messages on communities pages.”
Forbes Selling Links
Someone who appeared to originate an employee of Forbes wrote on the Google Webmaster Central forum seeking assistance with a link-violation notice. The notice demanded Forbes to eliminate links that were not natural from their content.
Google’s Matt Cutts commented in the thread that he’d confirmed numerous times that paid links have passed PageRank. Cutts advised that Forbes take down the paid links that have passed PageRank in order to get an inverse penalty. TechCrunch revealed the fact that Forbes began to take down the paid links in 2011, following the penalty.
Google Chrome’s Paid Link
Even Google isn’t perfect in their SEO every now and then. One time they used the follow link within an article that was sponsored by Google Chrome. This is SEO black hat since the link was part of content sponsored by the company which had been paid for by the firm. The Google webspam team applied a penalty to www.google.com/chrome, reducing its Pagerank for a period of sixty days. The black mark that Google Chrome received Google Chrome resulted in the site to be ranked lower on results pages for the phrase “browser”.
Why You Should Avoid Black Hat SEO
Although black-hat SEO isn’t illegal, it is in violation of the webmaster guidelines laid out in the guidelines of search engines. Also, it’s not in compliance with the guidelines. If you are involved in black-hat SEO is that you have to be prepared to be hit with severe penalties as a punishment. Being penalized by search engines could result in your website being pushed down the results of searches or, even more importantly, be completely removed. Your website will be less popular and, ultimately, less customers.
Search engines have become more and more adept at identifying SEO methods that are not legitimate. Today, being caught using black hat SEO is almost all but inevitable. Black SEO is not a good idea. SEO doesn’t solve the problem the problem of the user, and it does not solve the problem problems for search engines. While you may experience the short-term benefits of the use of black hat SEO, in time, search engines will be able to detect your shady ways and erode your search engine visibility.
The Blurred Lines of Grey Hat SEO
It’s unlikely to find grey hat SEO in an Robin Thicke track However, you’ll locate it somewhere between black and white SEO. If you’ve come across an SEO technique that you are unable to classify as white or black SEO, it’s probably a grey-hat method.
What is Grey Hat SEO?
Grey hat SEO comprises some SEO practices that are a bit shady. Although they’re not against SEO-related practices that are prohibited by search engines however, they’re a little illegal and could be a cause for bans in the near future.
Grey hat SEO is closely resemble black SEO. Grey hat techniques are typically not outlined in the webmaster guidelines as prohibited practices, but they’re not without doubt. A lot of grey hat techniques are now black hat as time passed, especially after search engines discovered them.
How To Avoid Black Hat SEO
It’s not a secret that SEO that is black white hat SEO could be risky venture which isn’t worth the risk. Here are the best ways to avoid black-hat SEO:
Treat searchers and search engines in the same manner. Beware of “cloaking” or tricking search crawlers into redirecting them to a different page. Always concentrate on resolving issues for the user and creating the best user experience for users between search engine and site.
Create only original, high-quality content that does not contain keyword filler. Don’t scrape, duplicate or reword any content that belongs to other people. Google’s guidelines for content and our Content Creation Kit may prove useful.
Be sure to follow the guidelines when you add structured data on your site. Be sure that any schema markup you create is precise and does not mislead users.
Don’t purchase or sell links. And keep in mind that it’s not only money that’s considered to be a illegal exchange. Offering free products as a substitute for hyperlinks is forbidden. If you’re not sure if it is unethical to exchange products, take a look at guidelines from the FTC Guidelines for endorsements and refer to this comprehensive blog post on hyperlinks that are paid for by Google.
Do not set up your own blog network for the purpose of gaining hyperlinks. Make sure your site and content are different so that people can link to you naturally instead of faking it until you create it. This never works.
Keep up-to-date with webmaster guidelines to avoid the black hat methods that are banned from search engines. These are rules for webmasters of Google along with Yahoo.
Do not ask yourself “how do I get rid of a Google penalty?” If you have to consider whether something is considered black hat and not most likely is. White hat SEO method is a more effective approach to Search Engine Optimization. In the long time, it will pay dividends, and you’ll be able to relax at night knowing you’ll not see a drop in rankings because of a hefty penalty. Therefore, for the interest of search engines don’t do black hat SEO. In the end, they’re the ones who keep SEOs from being in business.
