In an article posted by SemRush, they covered the top 9 risky techniques you should avoid in order to not be participating in Black Hat SEO.
To start off, we must understand exactly what Black Hat SEO is. Black Hat SEO is using manipulative tactics that violate search engine guidelines in order to increase a site’s ranking on a search engine result’s page. Search engines make it clear in their guidelines which practices are accepted, and which are not. The article also mentions the three main reasons why you should avoid Black Hat SEO: it can negatively impact your search rankings and visibility, it won’t drive long-term results, and it typically results in a poor user experience.
Now onto the main portion of this blog post which consists of the tactics to avoid. The first one is keyword stuffing. This is when you repeat keywords excessively, but results in an unnatural flow and often gets blocked. The second one is automatically generated/duplicated content. An example of this is if you put the same content on a lot of different pages to make it seem like there is more content than there actually is. The third one is where you put hidden text positioned off the screen or behind an image in the same color as the background to hide it from users. The fourth tactic is using doorway/gateway pages which is where content is intended to act only as a funnel to one page. The fifth tactic is cloaking. This is when you aim to serve different content to users and search engines. The sixth is paid or manipulative links, known as the most common type of Black Hat SEO. The seventh type is misused structured data and rich snippets. This is described as using structured data to give factually incorrect information. The eighth tactic is misldeading redirects. The final tactic mentioned in the article to avoid is called Negative SEO. This is when you use unnatural links to someone else’s domain in the hope that they are penalized because of it.
The final portion of the article was about how to report Black Hat SEO. While there is an abundance of information on how to avoid Black Hat SEO, it still happens and both competitors and consumers need to be aware of these tactics.
2 Responses
Yes, this is important. You can’t just stuff keywords into your content. Google’s algorithms are smart enough to know when the language is unnatural and just trying to manipulate SEO rankings. Instead, focusing on quality content and backlinks is more effective.
Your list of all the different types of Black Hat SEO was helpful because of how thorough it was. It was encouraging to note that none of these Black Hat techniques could be done accidentally, but that they all require some form of intentional deception, because I know some people might be initially worried that they are accidentally committing a bigger crime. I also think that it’s important for us to not just learn about how to avoid Black Hat SEO, but to learn how to ethically promote and optimize our websites.