Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies that can boost online presence. It can improve your website visibility, search ranking, traffic, leads, and ultimately sales for your ecommerce business. However, the effectiveness of SEO depends on the tactics you choose and your execution. When you choose to use a risky Black Hat SEO technique, for instance, you could lose your entire visibility online.
Black Hat SEO is an illegitimate and unethical technique intended to manipulate search ranking. Believe it or not, there are still organizations today that still resort to Black Hat SEO tactics despite several warnings online. Some of them are even offering their services to website owners.
On this page, we’re going to explore the black hat strategy that should be avoided if you want to maintain your presence online.
What is Black Hat SEO Strategy?
There are two types of SEO strategies you can implement on your website –white hat SEO and Black Hat SEO. It sounds like two opposing philosophies. And yes, they are.
White hat SEO is an ethical way of doing search engine optimization. Here, you are following the best practices and policies of search engines to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERP). The black hat SEO, on the other hand, uses an approach that deceives search engines. It’s a shortcut approach designed to manipulate the search engine to quickly rank up on SERP.
Why should you avoid black hat tactics?
If black hat SEO can bring your site to a higher place on SERP quickly, then why should you avoid it? The reason for this is that the result you get may only be temporary. And once Google or other search engines found out that you go against their terms and spam policies, you can get penalized leading to a sharp drop in search engine ranking and lower website traffic.
Decades ago, black hat SEO tactics were used to work and bring results to website ranking. However, a lot of things have changed. Search engines are much wiser today. They can easily detect if you are trying to cheat the system.
Google launched different algorithmic updates designed to penalize websites that use a black hat strategy. One of the most Prominent is the Panda update in 2011, which was designed to punish thin and poor content. Another huge update was Penguin in 2012, which punish websites that uses link schemes to manipulate search results.
6 Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid
The more you know about the black hat tactics, the more you can avoid them. To protect your website reputation, here are the six black hat SEO practice you should avoid.
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is probably the most popular black hat SEO to date. The reason for this is that it used to work back in the ‘90s.
Keyword stuffing is the excessive repeating of your main keyword across the page that it sounds unnatural. This black hat practice won’t work anymore as Google prioritizes content that provides useful answers to people’s queries.
Instead of relying on poor-quality content to target your main keyword, we suggest finding time to write in-depth content that covers your topic. This way you can target all relevant keywords including those specific long forms.
2. Hidden Text and Spam
As the name suggests, this practice is the act of placing content, keywords, or links that are not viewable by the human eye. There are several ways to do this. One is by using text color that is similar to the background. Another is by setting up the font size and opacity to zero. Or, using CSS to position text off-screen.
This black hat strategy won’t work anymore today. Search engine crawlers are much more sophisticated these days, they can instantly detect hidden text and spam on the page.
3. Link Spam
Link Scheme is another common black hat technique. Some marketers are still tempted to do this for their link-building strategy. They would resort to buying links to another website and receive link juice from it that could help improve their website’s ranking. This is a bad tactic on many levels.
Google will penalize the websites of both sellers and buyers of links. The algorithm might not sniff out all paid links, but it’s getting better and smarter every day. As we mentioned, the result of the black hat strategy won’t last that long.
But Link Spam is more than just about buying and selling links. Google listed examples that you should avoid:
- Excessive link exchanges
- Comment Spam
- Forum Spam
- Paid advertorials, guest posts, and press releases
- Automated link building
- Spammy directories and bookmarking sites
- Widely distributed links in the footers
4. Cloaking
Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique that presents different content to users and search engines to manipulate ranking. One example is a website publishing content about travel to search engines. On the other hand, it shows coupons for drugs to human users.
The said practice offers a different experience for the user and search engine. It’s a deceptive tactic that violates the guideline of Google and other search engines.
5. Rich Snippets Spam
Also known as structured data, a rich snippet is a useful feature that can change how your content is displayed on your sear engine. You can add structured data depending on the type of your content. This is very useful when you write reviews, recipes, or different how-to guides.
Adding rich snippets to your content is completely okay. However, providing inaccurate information just to get the attention of searchers can be very risky. Your website can get penalized in two forms. It can affect a portion of your site or your whole website. So, if you are thinking of abusing your structured data, you might want to reconsider.
6. Negative SEO
This is not a common black-hat SEO strategy, but we strongly recommend that you pay attention to this. In Negative SEO, the user attempts to reduce the ranking of their competitor by using several means to go against the policy of the search engine.
The most common tactic is by creating multiple unnatural links and sending it the to their competitor. They could also send links using anchor text related to adult content such as Viagra, poker online, and many more.
To protect your site against spammer, make sure to monitor your backlink. Google released disavow tool to help you counter negative SEO. It informs the search engine to not consider the specific link you receive.
SEO Strategy the Right Way
Black hat SEO isn’t worth the risk. It may provide a quick boost to your search ranking, but it can only bring you a short-term benefit. If search engine crawlers detect your black hat tactics, your website may suffer severe consequences, including a significant loss in your online visibility.
We suggest focusing on the white hat SEO approach. This SEO strategy may require more effort, but it can bring you a long-lasting result. If you need assistance to level up your SEO strategy, Be Global Ecommerce is here.
When you choose to partner with us, we will bring a team that will conduct a thorough analysis of your site, identify areas of improvement, and determines the SEO strategy that will work for you. We are committed to helping you establish an effective SEO strategy for your business. Let us take you on the right path toward achieving your goals. Contact us today.
