There are a lot of SEO techniques that marketers employ to help boost their sites’ rankings. These techniques could either be white hat or black hat. This article will specifically focus on the black hat SEO techniques that you need to avoid. Usually, black at SEO techniques are practices that are utilized to help improve a website’s rank in search engines through ways that go against the search engines’ terms of service. This is a term that hails from Western films to differentiate the bad guys from the good guys. Most people use black hat techniques so that they can be impressed by their site’s performance when they log on to https://serpbook.com.
Here are eight black hat techniques that you need to avoid.
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Keyword stuffing
Search engines look for relevant keywords when they are ranking sites. As a result, you find that some sites repeatedly put a keyword or the keyword phrase in their content to increase their chances of being spotted by search engines. When you stuff keywords, your content will sound unnatural to the reader. It is crucial that you to avoid this black hat practice; instead, go with the proper keyword density to have high-quality content.
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Paid links
Any site that has high-quality backlinks will most likely rank higher on search engines. That is why you find some sites purchasing links to try and look good to search engines. This is a practice that people are discouraged against because most paid links tend to be low-quality and irrelevant. That notwithstanding, your site is at high risk of being penalized by Google. There is no need for you to jeopardize yourself in such a manner. It is more advisable to look for backlinks from authoritative sites that post similar content to yours.
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Spam comments
Another black hat SEO tactic that you need to avoid is using spam comments. Usually, spam comments are those irrelevant comments on your site’s pages that show an unrelated link. It is a tactic that is used to try and get links to your site. Bots instead of people normally place spam comments. They create them to pass them across the internet. However, this is a technique that you are discouraged from carrying out.
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Cloaking
This is another black hat technique that entails tricking search engines into thinking something completely different from the content that is available on your site. People use this technique to try and drive more traffic to their sites. Whatever they do is that they write one content for Google bots to crawl through, and another different content for the web users. It is a technique that provides users with the bad user experience. That is why you need to stay away from it. Additionally, it violates the terms of service set by different search engines. Therefore, carrying out this technique puts you at risk of getting penalized.
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Social network spam
Currently, social media has an essential role in search engine rankings because it helps to create brand awareness, generating more traffic to sites. As a result, people have adopted social network spam, a black hat technique that involves posting a lot of irrelevant and unrelated links on social media platforms. You can find these links in the comments, pages, and even groups. At other times, sites could send social networks spam links directly to users. It is not advisable to present your followers with irrelevant links as you try to generate traffic to your site. Instead, provide them with genuine content.
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Invisible text
You might have heard of this technique, which goes against Google Webmaster Guidelines. It is a black hat tactic that involves hiding text such as links and keywords. Site owners do this by hiding text behind images or writing texts with the same color as the background. A web user may not see them because of the manner in which they are written, but they mostly comprise of excessive keywords so that search engines may notice them. This is a deceptive tactic that is meant to manipulate a site’s rankings.
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Doorway pages
Doorway pages are a black hat technique that you should avoid. They are pages that are keyword-optimized, but when a user clicks on them, he/she gets redirected to a completely different page. The first doorway page usually has irrelevant content and has no meaningful purpose. It is solely meant to boost a site’s rankings.
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Scraping
Scraping involves stealing content from a competitor’s site and posting it on yours to get more traffic and improve your rankings. It can also be utilized to extract email addresses so that the users can be spammed.
Conclusion
The black hat techniques mentioned above are those that you need to avoid completely because they could even get your heavily penalized. Instead, go for white hat techniques that follow all search engine guidelines, plus they are user-friendly.
