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First, let’s explain what a black hat SEO is. Black hat SEO refers to a set of unethical search engine optimization practices used to raise a website’s search engine results page (SERP) ranking. There are various techniques involved in SEO which are classified as White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.
Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using obtaining backlinks unnaturally.
Why Should You Avoid Black Hat SEO?
In order to rank quickly in SERPs and gain huge impressions, clicks, engagement and more sales, bloggers try to do black hat SEO techniques. Everybody should know that implementing Black HAT SEO techniques will penalize them at some point from search engines.
There are various SEO techniques that are considered as Black Hat. Some of those have been mentioned below.
How to recognize Black Hat SEO Tactics:
- Content Automation
- Doorway Pages
- Hidden Text or Links
- Keyword Stuffing
- Reporting a Competitor (or Negative SEO)
- Sneaky Redirects
- Cloaking
- Link Schemes
- Guest Posting Networks
- Link Manipulation (including buying links)
- Article Spinning
- Link Farms, Link Wheels or Link Networks
- Rich Snippet Markup Spam
- Automated Queries to Google
- Creating pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content
- Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, trojans, and other malware
The Most Common Black Hat SEO Techniques:
Article Spinning
The content is basically the same content, with most of the words being replaced by their synonyms. The content remains the same, but it doesn’t trigger a duplicate content alert because the sentences aren’t exactly the same.
Keyword stuffing
It is important to use such keywords effectively and precisely as per keyword density but then if you overuse it, your site will be spammed. Repeating the same keyword or stuffing it on the article will not help you.
Hidden Text
It refers to the text and links of a page’s content that is invisible to the user while visible to the search engines. SEO practitioners use the text which is visible to the search engine spiders but not to people visiting your website.
Duplicate Content:
As the name suggests, duplicate content refers to the well-known “copy and paste” content creation practice across domains and means that blocks of copied content from different sources exactly match each other or look very much alike.
Purchasing of links
Buying backlinks is also one black hat technique that you should avoid. The buyers and sellers of the links fell back on the rankings after the Penguin update. So it is better to avoid purchasing such links.
Cloaking
Cloaking is one of the most popular black hat SEO techniques where one shows the search engine something different while taking the visitors to a different web page.
Copied Content
When you copy the content from other URLs means you have intentions to misguide the visitors coming to your site. It becomes difficult for search engines to find out the correct/original content and show it in the SERP.
Markup Schema Spam
It’s a type of code you can add to your pages so that search engines can understand the content better. You can completely renovate your Meta descriptions and transform them into rich snippets.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are where you spam the index of search engines to catch visitors using a page of no real value, which then redirects the user to a completely different page. Doorway pages are created to be visible to only specific search engines and their crawlers with the purpose of deceiving the search engine into giving the site higher rankings.
Pingback SPAM
It is a technique in which servers are frequently notified that “new” content has been posted on a site, when in fact it has not.
These Black hat SEO techniques are very effective in earning a higher SEO rank for a small period of time until Google is able to catch it and then a penalty is given to the company.
