About the Author
Claire Beutel has over 10 years of experience developing innovative SEO and marketing strategies for retail and e-commerce websites of all sizes. He has worked with a host of industries and business models, from the Denver Broncos to Aramark, applying technical SEO recommendations and creating quality content that drives organic traffic and conversions. Passionate about increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to her website, Claire uses data-driven analytics to determine the best overall strategy for businesses to be successful in the long term.
Before search engines like Google started creating algorithms to rank websites based on criteria like relevance, content quality, and links, the search engine optimization tactic (black hat) was the most popular thing since bread. sliced. But what is black hat SEO?
In simple terms, Black Hat SEO consists of website optimization strategies that are now considered unacceptable or unethical to search engines. The term "black hat" is derived from old western movies, where good cowboys wore white hats and bad cowboys wore black hats.
Black Hat SEO was attractive to marketers. It could increase the ranking of organic research quite quickly. Today, however, the use of these techniques has had far from positive results and could cost you a lot. In this blog, we discuss seven black hat tactics that you better leave in the 90s.
Hidden text
Do you remember these cool invisible ink pens when you were a kid? At the time, marketers were using invisible or hidden text on a website to entice search engines to rank higher in organic search results (SERPs).
For example, if the background of a website was white, a savvy marketer would place the keyword paragraphs on the website the same color as the background, making it "invisible" to users, but exploitable to search engines. This hidden text is often placed on websites that visitors generally did not notice, such as the footer.
Today, this tactic no longer has a place in search engines and is considered an unacceptable SEO tactic that can lead to a lower organic ranking.
(Image credit: Kevin Ku / Pexels)
Camouflage
As the name implies, hiding is a sneaky way to show a website to search engines and a totally different website to users. According to Google, for example, one website presents Flash content to users, while another shows HTML content to search engines.
Link Farms
Google and other search engines consider links to internal and external websites to be valuable and use them as a ranking factor.
Many website owners were paying link farms for additional links pointing to their site. However, search engines have become wise with this tactic and will penalize a site that uses it.
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing was an effective technique in the 90s and early 2000s to rank organically in the SERP. But now this is not the case. The idea behind this sneaky technique was that if you inundated your website with keywords that you want to rank for, Google would rank it better for search terms and user queries.
Since Google released the Panda update, Google is monitoring keyword density very carefully. Rather than motivating a website with terms you'd like to be ranked for, creating user-friendly natural language content is the best way to appease search engines.
(Image credit: Pexels)
Hidden links
As we mentioned earlier, search engines consider link fairness when ranking a website. Hidden links are similar to what they look like - links on a website that the user cannot see but can still be explored by search engines.
Among the most common ways to hide links, it can include placing the text of a link behind an image, using links with a zero font size, or adding links of the same color as the 39; background color of a website.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content can take many forms, and today's search engines don't take duplicate content lightly. Before search engines became familiar with this Black Hat SEO technique, website owners placed the same content on multiple pages of a website to improve the ranking of each page, and often stole content from the website. site. 39, other websites.
Today, search engines like Google take duplicate content seriously, which should be avoided at all costs.
clickbait
Clickbaiting is a deceptive way to entice users to click on a website by using a misleading title to attract users' attention. Often times, the page title or meta description will say one thing and the website will say another.
For example, a site might ask users to click on a title tag that says "Get a free car." When you click on this link, the link will take you to a website that has nothing to do with getting a free car. This is an easy and unethical way to get clicks on a website. Most of the website owners who use this Black Hat SEO technique try to generate income based on the clicks on their sites. However, the search engines have understood this, this should be avoided entirely.
(Image credit: Pixabay)
The Top Two Reasons to Avoid Black Hat SEO
As we have presented above, you should avoid the unethical practice of Black Hat SEO tactics. For one thing, Black Hat SEO can lead to an unpleasant user experience.
Think about it: have you ever visited a website and found that it had absolutely nothing to do with what you were looking for? This can be extremely frustrating for users, which means they probably won't be coming back to this site that soon.
The second, perhaps the most important reason to avoid Black Hat SEO, is the fact that search engines are smart enough to take advantage of these techniques. They will not hesitate to downgrade your website in the SERP. And it will make it much more difficult for your business to attract leads and convert them into customers.