Every game has a set of rules that must be followed. Likewise, in SEO, there is a set of rules that every single webmaster should follow: the webmaster guidelines issued by the search engines. Any practice which violates the guidelines is referred to as “Black Hat SEO.” These are unethical practices you should avoid in order to keep your web pages safe from penalisation and also to improve your rankings. Webmasters should focus on providing quality content to users rather than manipulating the search engine algorithm.
Many a time, the SEO professionals do not realise where they have crossed the line while doing search engine optimisation. Thus, it is necessary to know about black hat practices so that you can ensure that they will never be used in your web pages. Let us take a look at some of these black hat SEO techniques:
Keyword stuffing
The practice of keyword stuffing can be said to have started along with the origin of SEO. Because, in the early years, the webpage with the maximum number of related keywords ranked first. People started to stuff a large number of keywords and their synonyms into the content, hence degrading the user experience. Repetitive use of keywords and their variations fills web pages with meaningless or unnatural sentences.
But this is not the case now; search algorithms are being redesigned to recognise quality content. So resorting to such bad tactics won’t improve your position on the Search Engine Result Page. Instead, there is a good chance that your pages might be demoted in rankings or penalised due to irrelevant content.
Thin, duplicate and scraped content
Using thin, plagiarised or duplicate content is also a black hat technique. One should only use authentic, unique, and creative content in their pages. It should also be useful and relevant to the users.
Scraped content includes content directly copied from other sites or content that has been slightly modified by replacing words with synonyms or changing sentence structure. Using scraped content hinders providing users any value and may also sometimes cause copyright infringement. It is best to create and publish original content on your web pages.
Cloaking
Cloaking is the practice of presenting web crawlers with one thing and the user with other things. It is done in many different ways. Some people match the text colour with the background colour, thus including hidden keywords.
Also, some people take advantage of the fact that search engines cannot read images. They feed html pages to the engines and show the users a page filled with images. Providing flash pages to the visitors and HTML pages to the search engine is also another way of using cloaking. Using such unethical practices may result in blacklisting your pages.
Doorway Pages
These are web pages created for specific search terms and their synonyms. These pages mostly serve as a doorway to the main page and therefore will not provide any useful information to the users. People who want their site to rank for queries for different locations often create a number of doorway pages, each dedicated to a specific location.
In most cases, the users are redirected to another page using the meta refresh command or JavaScript. Meta refresh commands are penalised by search engines, so many web pages trick their users into clicking on certain links that lead them to desired pages. Using doorway pages to manipulate search engine indexing strictly violates the search engine guidelines and can therefore be penalised or experience a loss in rankings.
Paid Links and Link schemes
The use of paid links for manipulating search results is prohibited by search engines. Selling and using paid links is a bad practice in terms of SEO. Large numbers of paid links are used to override the page rank algorithm. Although search engines support having a good number of authentic inbound and outbound links, it is unethical to pay for links using money or any other means. It is best to acquire links naturally. It builds the web page’s trust and also you don’t have to worry about sudden loss of rankings.
Paid links can be used for advertising purposes. However, in such cases, it should be specified by using the “nofollow” or “sponsored” attribute. Also, creating intermediate web pages blocked from search engines with a robot.txt file to redirect such links is also encouraged.
Using a large number of links produced using automatic programs is also a violation of webmaster guidelines. Stuffing anchor text with keywords is also a prohibited practice. Adding excessive links in blog or forum comments and footer templates is also harmful to your web pages. Collecting links from link farms is also undesirable.
Also, there exist a large number of Private Blog Networks (PBNs), which are similar to link farms. They are also used to increase the number of back links to websites. Mostly, these networks are expired domains that had some authority in the past. The black hat practitioners create some content similar to what had existed earlier on those sites and add links to their sites. This practice is also big a no in the SEO community.
Sneaky Redirects
Java Script or other types of redirects ( 301/302) are used to guide people to other pages or sites. While using redirects to lead users to your new website is considered good practice, taking them to undesirable locations is a violation of search engine guidelines. Such redirects deceive the spider bots into crawling the original page while taking the users to irrelevant pages. Showing content that differs from what the users searched for is a clear violation of the webmaster’s guidelines. Also, some redirects serve different content to users across different devices or platforms. Auditing your website for the presence of such redirects and removing them is a good practice.
In conclusion, resorting to black hat SEO may sometimes bring you good results, but beware, these rewards are short-lived. If you are looking for long-term benefits, never ever use these methods. If you get caught in the search engine’s radar, then there is no turning back. You are going to lose your rankings or even worse, get entirely delisted from the search engine. So, level up your SEO game only by using legitimate techniques and you will stand out from the crowd.