In the industry of content development, there are those people that try and get around the typical route and use the practice of black hat SEO. Black hat SEO goes against a search engines guidelines to change the search engines results page to show what they want. Below I have listed different examples of black hat SEO that I have learned about:
Cloaking: showing different content to the users than what a search engine would be able to see
Doorways or Doorway Pages: these are pages that exists for the sole purpose of redirecting traffic to another site, these are typically designed to rank for one phrase and than take the user to a completely different page
Hacked Content: this is content that is injected into a page without the owners permission
Hidden Text or Links: having content that is hidden behind an image to increase a sites ranking
Keyword Stuffing: Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
Link Spam: these are any links that are intended to manipulate a sites ranking in Googles results
Machine-Generated Traffic: traffic that gets to Google without being cleared
Malware and Malicious Behavior: pages that have intention to harm a users computer
Misleading Functionality: pages that are not working as they look they are supposed to
Scraping Content: borrowing content and making it slightly different and calling it your own
Sneaky Redirects: the act of redirecting users without them asking to be redirected
Spammy Auto-Generated Content: content that is generated by digital tools without human review
Thin Affiliate Pages: loosely associating with others without adding significant value
In conclusion, black hat tactic may seem tempting to use to increase your websites SEO but there are some the question if it is ethical to partake in these practices.
4 Responses
I agree! These black hat techniques are ones that should be avoided because of their unethical nature. Practices such as hacked content and link spam are bad because they are used to either get ahead of competition and sabotage their website or trick search engines and your audience. Any of these practices can get you in trouble and they make you untrustworthy.
I really like how you say “their long-term consequences outweigh any short-term gains.” I agree, and I think many people don’t look into the future and see the danger they are in when participating in black hat practices.
Hi! I definitely agree with your post, although I remember in class that Prof said most of these techniques are no longer effective in the modern world of Search Engines, so I may question the part about their “short term gains” as more of an illusion.
It is apparent you have done your research. I really enjoyed this read, it was also really well-written and coherent. Keep up the good work!