Let’s show you five Black Hat SEO practices that you do (or maybe are doing) and probably do not even know. Check out!
When Google was in its first steps, its ranking system was not at all complex. Gaps in ranking factors allowed sites to reach the top positions in the search engine, regardless of the level of quality of the content offered or the relevance to the user. And over time, tricks that took advantage of these possibilities were called Black Hat SEO.
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In this article, we’ll look at how these techniques work and list five of them that you still practice without realizing it. Check out!
Black Hat SEO: Where Did It Come From
Among the various possible SEO practices, two sets of techniques separate the wheat tassel: The Black Hat and the White Hat. The terms refer to the good old western movies, where the good guy wore white hats, and the bad guys wore black hats.
As in the Old West, White Hats represent good SEO – simple techniques preferred by search engines. Black Hats are the obscure practices seen as optimization cheats to achieve search success more quickly.
As we discussed, Black Hat used openings in the ranking rules to better position websites without much effort. Today, Google’s ranking is updated about 500-600 times a year – with drastic changes occasionally that can put the ranking upside down, as it did with Google Panda and Google Penguin. You can have positive results with Black Hat strategies in the short term. But in the future, it is sure your website will be punished for it. Sometimes even without you knowing why.
Here are five Black Hat SEO practices you do and (probably) do not even know:
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keywords have an essential function for the content you create, and they will be the north to define the relevance of what you write and what you are talking about. However, it is a regular practice of some SEO practitioners to pile keywords without criteria, taking cohesion and relevancy of the content in question. The ideal value for keyword density is 2% to 4%. Anything above that figure will likely be penalized by the Google Panda update made in 2011.
2. Repeating content
“Plagiarism” may be a word that sounds too strong, but if you have copied excerpts from other pages – even for reference purposes – you will probably be punished by the Google algorithm. Be unique in creating your Content Marketing and, if necessary, use links to those sites and let the viewers themselves look for what they’ve been told.
3. Comment Spam
Your comments on many blogs, websites, forums, and social networks should contribute to the discussion, not just slip the link from your page. In 2005, Google introduced the nofollow attribute, which, when encoded, instructed web crawlers to skip links like these while indexing the sites.
Still, SEO professionals apply this technique, which has been effective for a while. But like all Black Hat, if Google finds you, it will punish you. Is it worth the risk?
4. Guest blogging
This is a somewhat “misty” area. Bringing guest posts can be good for SEO and getting more links to your site. However, guest posting solely for building links on low-quality or irrelevant sites may stall your ranking, which is not approved by Google or by users themselves.
5. Broken links inside your site
Does its content change place at any moment? Keep an eye on internal links. When a user clicks on a link that leads nowhere, it is a sign of smoke for Google to apply sanctions to its ranking.
Big companies were penalized because of Black Hat SEO
Small companies, medium enterprises, and multinational organizations. No one is sure of Google’s brutal and agile penalties, regardless of whether or not they intend to violate the rules. Here are some of the most notable cases in recent years:
BMW was punished for manipulating search results
The auto giant has been punished for manipulating search results. In February 2006, whenever the term “used car” was searched, the user was redirected to the company page when he clicked through the results. The site was removed entirely from the search engine list for three days. This would result in a loss of 71 thousand hits.
Genius and the artificial promotion of links
In December 2013, the page was still called Rap Genius at the time and offered the artificial promotion of links to bloggers who post lyrics. Google did not allow the page to be ranked by its name and reduced its position in the ranking. If this happened today, it would mean a loss of about 3.8 million hits.
Even eBay has already had a manual punishment.
Mysteriously, in 2014, the sales page suffered a fall in rankings and a manual punishment, with no explanation from either Google or eBay. More than 6 million accesses would no longer be counted if this happened today.
Protect Your Business: Invest in White Hat SEO Practices
You can be seduced the easy way – even because performing quality optimization is tricky since Google’s criteria are subjective and of constant variation. However, the success of Black Hat SEO techniques is illusory. With the competitiveness of today’s markets, it takes a lot of creativity and, above all, a strategy to overcome competition.
If you want to invest in the longevity of your Internet business, there is no other option: put your efforts into White Hat SEO. After all, regardless of what search engines update on their algorithms, your online strategy will always be prepared as it is authentic and organic.
White Hat results – and Inbound Marketing generally – are not overnight but worth every second.
Is that you? Have you applied any of these strategies? Did you find out if they were positive or negative? Please share with us!
