10 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Should Avoid

The term black hat was introduced in the Hollywood movies for the first time to differentiate the bad (used to wear black hats) and good guys (used to wear white hats). Black hat SEO is described by a practice that increases the rankings of a site in the search engine. Black hat SEO used ways that break up the terms of services of the search engines. Black hat SEOs are usually termed as, hackers, virus producers and those who deal with unethical digital practice. One must keep oneself aware of the fact that these black hat unethical practices can result in a ban on the website.

While this type of SEO can increase your site’s ranking in the search engine but it still remains a condemned way. Google and Bing webmaster guidelines have discussed all the practices that are considered as black hat SEO. These guidelines will help you whether or not your tactics are black hat SEO. There is a litmus test for that. If your SEO is completely focused on getting you to the top rankings and you don’t care about the user experience then your SEO practice is definitely a black hat. Same rules also applied to the paid content called black hat PPC.

There is an extensive list of SEO tricks which are entitled as black hat SEO. Practices like; automated content and queries, cloaking, stuffed keywords, hidden links, creating pages and domains with duplicate content, link network, farms, and wheels, schemed links and spined articles, pages with viruses and doorway pages all come under the umbrella of black hat SEO.

If your site has been hacked or attacked by a virus then you must report it to a web spam report. Use Disavow links tool if you have been a victim of negative SEO. You also have an authority to report if you see a spammed web page for good keywords where your site has been ranked.

While black hat SEO can give you a short-term success by giving you top rankings and more traffic but in a long run, once Google has spotted you, you will have to face a lifetime ban on your site or Google will kick you out of its Google index.

Following are some of the black hat SEO tactics that you should avoid. Keeping track of these techniques allows you to excel the online presence of your business. Knowing about the techniques that you need to avoid is indispensable and so here are the black hat SEO techniques with their disadvantages written along.

Keyword stuffing

In the past years, if you wanted to rank higher in the search engine results you would have to fill your page with the keyword and get a domain which exactly matches with it. Back in 2012, Google was updated to catch those keyword stuffed sites and punish them. So if someone is practicing this technique of spreading the keyword all over the page he/she should change his/her practice because this black hat SEO won’t be fruitful for you anymore. Using LSIs is one of the best techniques to insert the keyword in the content smartly. These keywords are with the same meaning but don’t have the exact same spellings.

Cloaking

It is one of the most prevalent SEO techniques to fool Google. Through cloaking, SEO would insert a script on the site which has similarity to the content in search engine results but is entirely irrelevant to the users. This technique was helpful for ranking a particular keyword via displaying SEO pages to Google. But in reality, when human users clicked on the site, they were bombarded with spammed ads, unwanted images, and installers. SEO operators used this technique in the past to fool Google but now cloaking has officially been announced a black hat SEO trick by Google so beware of it.

Private blog networks

It is also called PBNs. As the name indicates, PBNs are a collection of blogs owned by one person or a group of people created for only one purpose i.e. transferring link juice to the primary sites. They are basically low quality spammed content linked to the primary website. This is one of the trendiest black hat SEO tricks because Google hasn’t identified it till now but in a way Google is updating day by day, it will soon be spotted by Google so it’s better to stop using this black hat SEO.

Web 2.0

This is the inferior version of PBNs. They are created on free web properties like WordPress and don’t require a server. Like PBNs, they lack quality content. As the content is manually linked to improving ranking so for Google this is not a trustworthy approach and you will soon get punished for it.  instead of making many web 2.0 sites, it’s better to follow a good practice of website development if you have a site build on WordPress, joomla or Magento ecommerce development.

Buying lots of irrelevant links

In the past days, SEO operators would connect countless links to their website and this technique would be enough to win their site the top ranking. Now, Google gives more weight to quality rather than quantity. Therefore, you need to have more relevant links instead of a greater number of links. Moreover, if your website gets a set of relevant links in a little amount of time, you can still get a penalty from Google as this search engine is aware of the fact that organic searches won’t earn you the good quality backlinks in a short period of time. You can purchase hundreds of backlinks by investing money on Fiverr gigs but remember that these haphazard links are tremendously dangerous for your website. Hence, don’t even think about using this black hat SEO technique.

Click baiting

This SEO tactic is basically used on Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites. In this technique, black hat SEO use falsified data, images and haunting headlines which are only created to catch the attention of visitors. Plus these are not real news or information in them. This black hat SEO technique is being closely monitored by Facebook and Google and there is a high chance that they will penalize it.

Domain redirection

Using this black hat SEO tactic, SEOs register domains which are expired but have good matrix and authority. This is entirely relevant to the keyword or an end match domain to it. Once you get the domain, it will always be redirecting to your primary site. In this way, it will bring you authority and juice links. Keep in mind that 301 redirection is not illegal so Google finds it hard to punish domain redirection tactic. Still, Google will soon penalize it so it’s better to stop practicing this black hat SEO technique.

Page switching

If you take a top-ranked page with a busy traffic on Google and modify its content this is called page switching. Black hat SEO will aim at queries with notable search volume and is useful for the consumers. After getting the required ranking in the search engines they will replace the content with the marketable content. So the visitors suffer a lot in this way. Search engines want the users to get the most relevant content in their search results. If the content of your site is the exact opposite of the search engine intentions you will soon get punished.

Spun content

This black hat SEO technique is used by those who are not able to generate high-quality genuine content. Online stores have many tools to make you able to spin other’s content and use it on your site. Here, you will use the same content but replace some words with their synonyms and use sentences in different order etc. As a result, the quality of your webpage lowers and you won’t get higher rankings. Thus, this black hat SEO tactic is basically harming your site indirectly.

Duplicate content

If you are copying other’s content and then pasting it on your site you are wasting your efforts and time because Google can easily spot duplicate content and remove it. Therefore, if Google can catch you in this there is no reason you should be using this black hat SEO technique.

To sum up, if you are in the online business or related to  for long term goals and objectives then these black hat SEO techniques will harm you and you will only get a temporary benefit. In addition, Google is continuously updating itself to make its search engine more relevant to user experience it is high time that you should stop using these tactics anymore