Those who practice black hat SEO rely on breaking the rules to rank higher, and although this can be effective, you can end up having your website blacklisted. For obvious reasons, you don’t want this to happen. In today’s day and age, having your website blacklisted can make a drastic impact on your ability to gain new business opportunities. If you’re interested in seeing what falls under black hat SEO, here’s a look at some techniques:
Adding unrelated keywords to bait searchers
This is commonly referred to as “bait and switch” marketing. Most business owners know that using this tactic is unethical, but sometimes, you fall into the trap without realizing it. Perhaps you’re not finding much success ranking for keywords you’ve researched, so you try some keywords that seem to be trending, and it works! You start getting more traffic than you were before. This is because those keywords are very highly searched but don’t have much competition.
Unfortunately, adding keywords that don’t have any connection to your website and/or keywords that would make sense to rank for looks unnatural to the search engines. Let’s say you have a coffee shop. If you add a few sentences about how a specific popular celebrity would love your coffee shop, you might end up being found for searches on that celebrity. Chances are, your visitors would leave your website pretty quickly when they realize it has nothing to do with celebrity gossip and everything to do with coffee.
Use of content automation in comments/body text
Google and other search engines like to see comments on your blog posts; however, they need to be natural and make sense. There are many programs out there to achieve content automation wherein your comments and/or body text is automatically generated by a bot. You can input your specific keywords, then the program of your choice will use those keywords at least once or twice in the comments/body text of the blog. This helps the URL rank higher, but because it’s randomly generated, it often doesn’t make much sense to the end reader OR the search engines.
While comments on your blog will help enhance keyword variation while improving the quality of the content, irrelevant comments on your blog posts will end up doing some damage. Plus, spammy comments found on blog posts tend to discourage real visitors from leaving a comment.
Hiding text or links within content
A common technique involves hiding text or links throughout your content. This might include setting the font size to zero, adding white text on a white background, using a div tag or hiding a link within a small character. Google and other search engines have stopped looking for how many times a specific keyword is found on the page, so although this may get some sort of results, it’s not as effective as it would’ve been 5 years ago. Google uses artificial intelligence nowadays — determining the quality and relevancy of the content found on your website.
This is why it’s recommended to write for your target audience rather than writing for the search engines. Of course, it’s great to add your keywords once or twice throughout any given page or post, but don’t get hung up on filling the page with keywords, especially if they’re hidden. It’s not necessary.
Setting Up of Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are essentially sites or pages created to rank for specific keywords. The goal is to lead users to your company as they’ll find your sites and pages anytime they search for specific words or phrases. While this makes sense in theory, users end up finding multiple similar pages — ending up in the same destination every time they click on the links found in the search engine. They end up being a huge eyesore for search engines and a source of frustration for visitors.
Google and other search engines see this as manipulation, and if they catch on, they will rank you lower because of it. They don’t want their users being brought to the same page every time they click on the first few search results for any given search. Although this may work very well initially, it has the potential to end badly.
Use of Cloaking to Trick the Search Engines
Cloaking is a technique wherein the content or information presented to the search engine crawlers is entirely different from what’s presented to the people visiting the URL. This is done to achieve better indexability, and in turn, higher search rankings for specific keywords. Google and other search engines have been known to permanently ban any sites or site authors that use cloaking, so while it can be effective, it can eventually catch up with you and result in the end of your website being shown on the search results.
Some examples include serving a page of HTML text to search engines, but that page shows an image to users or inserting keywords into a page when the user agent requesting the page happens to be a search engine while those keywords don’t show up for actual visitors themselves.
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