Contact UsThe Seo doyens of a notable digital agency in Search Engine Optimization in Delhi know how important search engine optimization is for most of the online businesses. We mean who doesn’t want to get that front row seat of online visibility and be noticed by the users first? Who doesn’t want to get recommended by the popular search engines itself- no let us correct, who don’t want to get recommended by the most popular search engine Google? Every website does, well most of them and this need for supreme visibility make the website owners and their corresponding seo pundits partake in shady and unethical seo practices that fall short of meeting the Google guidelines. These unethical practices revolving around the ever dynamic world of seo are collectively known as Black Hat SEO Techniques.
Black Hat SEO is a substandard and unethical practice involving the improvement of your website ranking on SERPS by unapproved means that violate the general guidelines of Google’s ranking criteria by manipulating the search engine and misguiding it about your website. These Black Hat SEO practices may reap you desired benefits in the short term, but the long term implications of employing such techniques can be severed including the penalization and permanent ban by Google.
The Black Hat SEO practices are employed by various websites who are not doing well in SERPs so that by unethical means they can impress the search engine crawlers to grant them with a higher ranking in the SERPs. The websites that blatantly use these techniques don’t care about their niche or if they are actually providing any value to the customers. Black Hat SEO practices, when caught by the search engines, can put your website in jeopardy and ruin it to slithers. That’s why the experts of one of the leading Website Development Company in Delhi recommends all the websites out there to not let your website reputation be ruined by using the following shady Black Hat SEO Techniques.
Here Are Few Black Hat SEO Techniques
Cloaking: Cloaking in general terms means “hide, cover, or disguise something”. The implication of this word in seo isn’t much different. You are indeed hiding something but form the search engine bots. Cloaking is an unethical way of misleading search engines crawlers by showing them different content and showing entirely different content to the users. Google defines cloaking as
- Serving a page of HTML text to search engines while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
- Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the user agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor
Keyword Stuffing: Well, this one seo practice is literally being used by half of the websites present over the net. It is an old and widely used seo practice to help webmaster to rank higher in the search engines. Keyword stuffing involves the unnecessary stuffing of the target keywords into the different sections of the website like <head>, <body>, content etc for any particular topic just to rank high in the SERPs. Just imagine how would it feel when you have to read a same word or phrase after every 5-6 words in every line frequently? You’ll get irritated, confused and annoyed because the content would not make any sense to you and you’ll eventually leave that part altogether. Don’t be surprised the readers will do the same.
Doorway or Gateway Pages: Doorway or Gateway Pages is another widely used Black Hat SEO practice or we can say an adaptive way of redirecting. Doorway or Gateway Pages are content-rich, poor quality duplicate pages designed to mislead search engine bots. They are generally multiple pages that are intended to be search engine landing pages but fall short in providing any value to the users. They are specifically designed for only the search engines to see so that users will only see the target page when they click on any of these pages.
Hidden Text and Links: Hidden Text and Links are those links and texts that only search engines can see so that they can rank the website accordingly, but they are not visible to the general users. Hidden text in seo language implies keeping the content of your website of the same color as the background and stuffing that part of content with extra links or keywords to rank higher in SERPs. With the content and the background of the same color it becomes impossible for the search engine crawlers to index that content.
Duplicate Content: This one is quite prevalent among average doing websites since they are usually low in resources and thus go for the same content that is already published on other websites or rewrite the articles, blogs, press releases and other website content and post them on their websites. Duplicate content is one of the major reasons for site de-indexing and bad performance in keywords top ranking in SERPs.
Article Spinning: This one is quite similar to the one we have just discussed; the only difference is that duplicate content is a copy and paste technique, whereas in Article Spinning software is used to modify the articles so that only the words and sentences change but the meaning remains the same. The articles that are spun are often poorly written and do not provide any new information to the users. It’s an escape route for the websites who either don’t want to or don’t have the resources to write fresh content.
Bait-and-Switch: Bait-and-Switch is another unethical and shady SEO practice wherein the website completely changes the layout and content of the page once the user is directed to it. Bait-and-Switch is the action of advertising a product at an extremely low price, thus bating or luring customers into buying the product and substituting, “switching” inferior or more expensive goods at the time of the purchase. Bait-and-Switch is an unethical form of advertising, when found, the websites can be penalized or worse banned from the search engine results.
Also Read: What Type of Content Your Readers Want to See in 2018?
Cookie Stuffing: Cookie Stuffing is a way of putting or stiffing cookies in someone else’s browser without letting them know. So when a visitor visits a website, the visitor’s website is bombarded with third party cookies which are entirely from a different website. If the visitor gets to the website the cookies of which has been placed and if they happen to purchase something from it, that is if they convert, the cookie stuffer will get a commission and a small part of the profit.
Link Buying or Exchange: We all know how important inbound, outbound and backlinks are for the ranking of the website since it is one of the major search engine ranking factors of the Google’s ranking algorithm. More websites link to your page means the more useful and informative your content to them is. But, unfortunately, link building has also been plagued by the gruesome intentions of seo guidelines violators. Nowadays websites have started buying bulk links or doing link exchanges to get a huge number of links to their website. Google was fast in detecting this malpractice and thus placed bots to detect if the source of the link is relevant to your website, if not, then get ready for the repercussions.
Private Blog Networks (PBN): Private Blog Networks (PBN) is a massive collection of highly reputed and authority websites all of which are under the absolute control of you and all of which link back to your money site. These PBNs are generally made of expired domains that boast great backlinks and therefore pass a high level of equity to your money site. PBNs are used for the purpose of manipulating the search engines. But Google has obviously started to take strict action against Private Blog Networks (PBN) with severe penalties and permanent bans.
Click-and-Bait: Click-and-Bait is an unethical practice of luring the customers into visiting a particular link by displaying sensational and eye-catching headlines that bounds visitors to visit that particular link to attract click-throughs and increase sharing of the content over the online social networks. These links forward the users to a page that requires payment, registration, or is one in a series of pages to help drive page views for the site. The click-and-bait links are often led by headlines such as “You won’t believe” or “What happened next will shock you,” just to spark the user’s curiosity into a click.
Read Also: Let’s Talk a Little About Cookies Stuffing
Meta Tag/Description Stuffing: Meta Tag or Description Stuffing is the unnecessary placement of target keywords and phrases to manipulate search engines into indexing your web pages for those keywords and phrases and thus rank your website high for them. Instead of doing any good Google’s bots will easily detect this small glitch and thus will further reprimand your website by pushing it further down the search engine results for such malpractice.
Well, we’ll give you time to process this 1st set of Black Hat SEO Techniques, for the other half stay tuned.
