About 75% of search engine users never look beyond the first page of search results. With SEO, you can improve your organic rankings to appear in front of consumers first. If you’re using black hat SEO, however, Google will blacklist your sites from search engine result pages (SERPs).
Consumers might never find your website online as a result.
What is black hat SEO, exactly, and what techniques should you avoid to improve your rankings this year? Read on to find out!
After learning more about black hat SEO techniques, you can improve your overall SEO strategy to help your rankings rise. Improve your strategy with these tips today.
What Is Black Hat SEO?
First, let’s cover the basics. What is black hat SEO?
Some business owners and marketers use black hat SEO tactics to quickly improve their organic search engine rankings. These techniques involve manipulating search engine algorithms. However, these techniques violate search engine guidelines.
Search engines like Bing and Google have already outlined SEO practices that go against their terms and guidelines. You can find Google’s Webmaster Guidelines here. If you use black hat SEO techniques, these search engines will likely penalize your site.
You’ll either get blacklisted or receive a lower-ranking position. You’ll start noticing a decline in organic traffic to your website as a result.
Without strong SERP rankings, you could also struggle to:
- Generate brand awareness and recognition
- Appear ahead of competitors
- Gain brand trust
- Generate loyal customers
- Generate more leads and sales
- Improve your ROI
- Become a credible resource within your industry
Don’t risk it by using black hat SEO tools and techniques. Instead, consider partnering with an experienced digital marketing agency. They’ll ensure you’re using the proper techniques to boost your organic rankings.
Once you rank at the top of a SERP, you can start generating more brand awareness, traffic, and online sales.
The Risks
Why is it such a risk to use black hat SEO techniques?
For a start, these practices are considered unethical. Using tricks to improve your search engine rankings won’t benefit you in the long run, either. For the most part, cheating the system only provides short-lived benefits.
According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, violations could lead to your site getting removed from the Google index. It might no longer show up in results on Google or any of Google’s partner sites.
As a result, black hat SEO tactics could negatively impact your search rankings and online visibility. If you lose traffic and visibility, you’ll start losing conversions and revenue as well.
If the majority of your customers find your business online, you need a strong search engine presence. It won’t matter how many keywords you target or how many blog posts you write. Your content won’t appear on Google if you’re using black hat SEO techniques.
You might lose a huge source of income, leading to job losses or even the closure of your entire business. Losing organic traffic could hurt your paid media strategies like PPC, too.
Google will recognize you’re using unethical practices as well. If it blacklists your site, you won’t reap any benefits from using black hat techniques.
If you want to experience the long-term benefits of higher SEO rankings, you need to use white hat, ethical SEO techniques.
6 Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid
If you want to improve your search engine rankings, you need to make sure you’re avoiding black hat techniques. Here are a few to avoid as you develop your SEO strategy for the year.
If you’re still struggling to boost your organic rankings, work with an SEO agency right away. They’ll assess your current SEO strategy to determine why your rankings aren’t improving over time. They could help you recognize you’re using black hat tactics before your rankings drop.
1. Keyword Stuffing
Each page and post on your website should target a specific keyword. Targeting keywords can help you rank for relevant searches, allowing you to reach customers online.
It’s not beneficial to stuff a page or post with a single target keyword, though.
Instead, the keyword should appear naturally within the text.
If you’re overusing the same keyword within a given post, consider using synonyms or related keywords instead.
2. Duplicate Content
Many businesses struggle to create unique, informative blog content as part of their SEO strategy. Creating quality content is one of Google’s top ranking factors. However, some businesses try to improve their rankings by automatically creating content or duplicating content.
Make sure each post on your page is unique and helpful.
3. Cloaking and Hidden Text
Hidden text is text that is the same color as the background of a page, hiding it from view. Some marketers use this technique to stuff keywords or place a list of keywords on a page.
Cloaking, on the other hand, involves serving different URLs to users and search engines, providing different experiences on each.
Instead, focus on creating quality experiences for your users.
4. Paid Links
Generating high-quality backlinks can help improve your organic rankings. Some businesses have started paying for backlinks, leading to link schemes.
Try to avoid:
- Automated link building
- Site-wide footer or sidebar links
- Large-scale article marketing
- Forum spam
- Blog comment spam
- Excessive link exchanges
Also avoid paid or sponsored links that don’t contain a rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attribute.
If you’re not sure how to generate natural backlinks, hire an SEO agency.
5. Misused Structured Data
Structured data can help pieces of your content appear at the top of SERPs, helping you reach customers before your competitors get the chance. Misused structured data and rich snippets involve giving factually incorrect information.
Hiring an SEO specialist can help you appear for rich snippets using proper techniques.
6. Misleading Redirects
Using redirects on your site ensures your content is organized while improving the user experience. However, sneaky redirects can deceive search engines by displaying content that differs from what the user sees.
For example, the user might reach a different destination URL than what a search engine indexes.
Improve Your Rankings: Hire an Agency to Avoid Black Hat SEO
Don’t let these black hat SEO tactics hurt your organic rankings. Instead, consider hiring an experienced SEO marketing agency this year. With their help, you can focus on using white hat SEO tactics to rank higher on SERPs.
With higher rankings, you can reach more customers to give your business the boost it needs.
Eager to get started? We’re here to help.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation.
