The Search Engine Optimization industry continues to thrive and is on its way to becoming one of the top online industries of the world in the next decade. As the SEO industry evolves, so do the techniques through which people and companies can take their websites to higher ranks in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
As a beginner, you should learn white-hat SEO techniques and implement them in your website content for making your website well-reputed. Although it is essential to know the healthy practices of SEO, you also need to learn about the techniques which are harmful. Black-hat SEO techniques are techniques which break the rules established by search engines and focus solely on increasing the rank of a website, disregarding customer satisfaction.
These techniques can also work adversely, leading your website towards downfall, as the website faces heavy penalties from the search engines once they find out about the use of black-hat SEO techniques. Search engines do not appreciate such techniques as they are not helpful to the customers. Contrary to this, white-hat SEO techniques always focus on providing the best facilities to the visitors and, thus, the websites practicing such techniques get awarded by the search results accordingly.
Given below is a list of black-hat techniques that you must avoid to remain within the guidelines of the webmasters.
The practice of embedding keywords or numbers which convince the search engines that the page is relevant to the search is known as keyword stuffing. Usually, the keywords included have nothing to do with the services or products of the website. They get stuffed into the content of the website with the purpose to increase the rank of the website. The specialists can also hide these keywords from the visitors so that they remain visible to the search engines only. Keyword stuffing is a bad practice which contributes to the bad user experience.
Cloaking is the process of hiding the actual content of the website from the users. The crawlers get a completely different content and judge the website to be a good one. In cloaking, people use various keywords, titles, and descriptions which are entirely different from the content of the site. Once the search engine determines the use of this technique in a site, it gets banned.
Many search engines rate those websites highly which receive a high number of backlinks from other sites. These links act as proof that the site is reputed and reliable. Some groups of websites use hyperlinks to connect with each other, in an attempt to fool the search engines into believing that all the sites are well-reputed. These groups are collectively known as link farms. The links from link farms do not provide any traffic towards the site but just try to trick the search engines.
Websites should not practice excessive link exchanging as Google has forbidden it. Link buying means that you purchase links from other websites so that you can be able to manipulate your site’s ranking on the search engine result page. This technique is also useless to the public and thus worthless to the search engines.
Article spinning happens when you post articles on your website by modifying and replacing parts of the existing articles and slightly changing the perspective of the topic. When you indulge in article spinning, you reduce the quality of an article making it less useful to the visitors. Article spinning also reduces the options of websites where you can upload the article. Therefore you should always try to create original content that helps the visitors and is not result oriented.
Those pages where people using black-hat SEO techniques spam the index of search engines are known as doorway pages. These pages trick the visitors as they lead the visitors to a page of no real value that further redirects to an entirely unrelated page. Such doorway pages are only visible to specific search engines and crawlers. These deceive the crawlers and thus result in a higher rank of the website.
As the black-hat SEO techniques are useless in the long run and result in immediate penalization of the website, you shouldn’t waste your time and resources in such techniques. Instead, you should choose techniques ethically building a reputation of your website.
