Are you hungry for higher rankings? So hungry that you’d break SEO rules and regulations?
Don’t do it.
If you see an opportunity to improve search engine rankings, but it feels wrong - then it’s probably wrong and against Google’s quality guidelines. Abusing these guidelines may result in penalties or complete removal of a website from the search engine indexes. So how do you avoid using these “black hat” techniques? Let’s take a look -
What are black hat techniques?
Black hat techniques, also known as “spammy” techniques, are tactics used by website owners to gain higher rankings in search engines. These tactics typically involve presenting website content in a visual or non visual way that is unethical and creates a poor user experience for the visitor. While black hat techniques may create short-term gains, they could hurt your website in the long run. Here is a list of black hat SEO tactics to avoid when striving for good SEO results:
Cloaking
Cloaking is a black hat technique in which the website content is displayed differently to the search engine spider than it is to the human user. There are several different types of cloaking including, IP Address Cloaking, User-Agent Cloaking and JavaScript Cloaking. The purpose of cloaking is to get search engines to display the web page when it otherwise wouldn’t be displayed.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages or gateway pages are created to redirect users to another page. For example, if a user clicks on a SERP listing that is linked to a doorway page, then the user will most likely be redirected to another page that is irrelevant to the description that the user originally clicked on. The website owner had to of used some form of cloaking to send the user to the doorway page.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a black hat technique in which targeted keywords are repeated excessively throughout the website content. Some content editors even go to the extent to hide keywords by matching the text color to the background. This is frowned upon by search engines and can be easily detected.
Link Farm
Links farms are websites that stuff their websites with useless links and are solely linked together to gain popularity. Naïve website owners will then exchange links with these websites hoping to boost their rankings. You do not want to link your website to a link farm.
Paid Links
The number, and more importantly, the quality of links that link back to a website is a determining factor of how a website is ranked. In order to improve website rankings, some website owners purchase links from websites that pass link popularity values, rather than naturally building their link credibility through having others voluntarily link or “endorse” their web content. Purchasing links is against Google’s guidelines and can eventually impact a website negatively if it is penalized. To learn how to report paid links, check out this blog post written by the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts.
These are only a few of many black hat SEO techniques to be aware of when trying to improve your website’s visibility. There are many valid methods you can use to increase your website’s rankings including on-page and off-page optimization techniques. Contact your SEO team if you’re interested in learning more ways to optimize your website.