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Black hat SEO might seem like an easy shortcut to improve your search engine rankings and to gain more visibility in search, but before indulging in this activity, you should think twice as it can hurt your SEO more than it can help.
Black Hat SEO refers to a set of practices that work against the guidelines of the search engine and are used to boost a website’s search engine rankings and visibility. These techniques ignore the searcher’s intent, rather attempt to bypass best practices by cheating the system in order to improve the visibility through such unscrupulous practices.
Black hat SEO is known to hurt the website’s SEO practices in the long-term. Let’s get into detail as to why should we avoid using such techniques.
Why Should You Avoid Black Hat SEO?
Here are three points explaining why black hat SEO can harm your website and why should you avoid it.
- Negative Impact on Ranking & Visibility
Using black hat practices can ultimately lead to losing your website’s search rankings, visibility and traffic. As a website begins to lose traffic and visibility, it leads to less conversion rate, which can harm the overall business income and lead to loss of jobs or even business dissolution.
- No Long-Term Results
When rankings and organic performance of a website is increased using manipulative techniques, they are rarely sustained. It might take a while for Google to identify such black hat SEO practices, but once it does, a loss of traffic is inevitable.
One worst thing a website owner could face is seeing the rankings and traffic artificially inflates and suddenly drop in the near future. Businesses work on predictability, which is not possible when you use such practices.
- Poor User Experience
If SEO is good, it involves user experience on the website followed by great content and the best UX. However, using black hat SEO results in problematic situations and works as complete opposite by optimizing fir search engines, rather than for users.
If the search engine is made a priority over users, there is a high possibility of low conversion and poor user experience on the website.
Black Hat SEO Practices to AVOID
Here is a list of black hat SEO techniques and tactics people use to increase their visibility. Learn about them so that you can avoid using them next time for better results!
Cloaking
It is a black hat SEO technique used to trick the search engines into ranking content for a specific search term which is not tied to the content on the webpage. Cloaking means showing one piece of content to the users on the website while showing a completely different piece of content on the search engines, trying to fool the traffic into opening up your website.
Purchasing Backlinks
One of an off-page black hat SEO technique to increase the search rankings of your website is by buying a lot of high-quality backlinks to link your website. If you choose to purchase high quality backlinks, instead of earning them organically, it will only result in harm as the black hat marketers pay the website owner to link these backlinks to their site.
Keyword Stuffing & Duplicating
Keyword stuffing refers to using a specific keyword excessively in the content on your website in order to get high rankings on the search engine. If your content shows high keyword density, it is possible that you are using the technique of keyword stuffing.
Duplicating content refers to publishing the same content on multiple pages of your website in order to attract the search engines. In both these techniques, you tend to go against the search engine guidelines.
To rectify this, use keyword optimization and a duplicate content checker in order to make sure your pages send the appropriate signals to the search engines.
Posting Low-Quality Content
Search engines usually encourage websites with high-quality content as it is expensive and difficult to create, but many black hat marketers beat this technique by posting a lot of low-quality and cheap content. Rather than using this cheap technique to boost SEO, try to create relevant and valuable SEO content for long-term results.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO focuses on accusing a competitor of using black hat practices to boost their rankings. The motive of using this technique is to penalize the competitor’s website by falsely accusing them and making it appear as if they are engaged in such practices. Sometimes such website owners go to the extent of falsely reporting the competitor website to the search engine.
Spamming
In order to gain links back to the website, black hat marketers use black hat SEO techniques such as spamming comments on competitors blogs and articles with a link back to their website. They comment in dozens of numbers trying to attract their readers.
Link Farming & Private Blog Networks
Link farming and using private blog networks are two black hat SEO techniques that can quickly and inorganically build links. By using these two practices, a marketer is enabled to use a network of websites created only to link to sites that want to improve their search engine rankings and visibility.
False Redirects
Falsely misleading or redirecting audiences, traffic and search engines is another black hat SEO practice. A redirect link is set up leading the users and search engines to different pages on their website. This also happens if a high-quality page is redirected to a low-quality page, in order to boost the low-quality page’s search rankings.
Bottom Line
Now you know that Black Hat SEO practices might look like an easy way to game the system and to boost your search rankings and website visibility, but it is also unethical and can lead to permanent damage to your brand credibility and search visibility.
You must focus on creating your website using long-term SEO practices for long-lasting brand credibility. Therefore, AVOID the above-mentioned techniques at all costs to secure yourself for the future & for best results of your website!
