While every business wants to land a favorable ranking on search engine results pages, some are willing to use dubious methods to achieve this goal. Traditionally, improving your search engine rank and position is done with the help of Singapore SEO company, which perform several optimizations on your website to appeal more to search engine algorithms.
However, there’s a much darker side to SEO known as Black Hat SEO that resorts to using questionable tactics to boost a website’s position on search engines.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is the practice of improving and manipulating a website’s search engine ranking with the use of unethical practices that go against search engine guidelines. And despite being a branch of SEO—a process known for favoring long-term and sustainable progress—black hat SEO prioritizes quick and instant results.
Here are some common black hat SEO techniques to stay away from!
Keyword Stuffing
The excessive inclusion of keywords in a page’s content and elements to trick search engines into believing that a website is more relevant to a search query than it actually is. With the unnatural additions of keywords, this type of content is often awkward, unprofessional, and low quality.
Cloaking
The act of tricking search engine algorithms by submitting one version of a webpage, while users are presented with a completely different one. This is often done by creating more than one version of a website—one that appeals to search engine algorithms and crawlers and another for users—with the web server detecting the user accessing the website and reflecting the appropriate version of the webpage.
Link Farming
This is an extreme version of link building—an accepted SEO technique wherein a website acquires a hyperlink from another website to seem more credible and trustworthy to search engines. Link farming is a scheme where websites exchange links with each other for the sole reason of boosting each other’s search rankings. Compared to link building, link farming is less organic and prioritizes the quantity of links instead of quality.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages involve the creation of low-quality but keyword-rich pages that are designed specifically to rank well on search engine results pages. Once a user clicks on one of these links, they will immediately be redirected to a different page that may not necessarily share in the original page’s search engine ranking.
Hidden Texts and Links
As implied by the name of this technique, text and links are added to a webpage but aren’t visible to the user but can still be crawled and indexed by search engine algorithms. With black hat SEO violating search engine guidelines, those who are caught performing any of its techniques are liable to receive a penalty from search engines.
Generated or Duplicated Content
We all know that producing great content—content that is original, useful, and provides users with the information they’re looking for—is not easy, and black hat SEO practitioners have decided to take an unethical shortcut instead.
Instead of taking the time to produce well-researched and well-written content, black hat SEO practitioners have decided to simply produce duplicate or automatically generated content, which can come in many different forms. Black hat SEO professionals can simply focus on churning out large amounts of low quality content, mostly through automated tools like content farms, to attract search engine traffic.
Another way is to take existing content and use software or online tools to rewrite it automatically, producing multiple versions of a single article. There’s also plagiarism, where existing content from another source is directly copied and posted on a website.
Misused Structured Data
Structured data is meant to provide additional information to help users learn more about the content of your pages. This is often a piece of code that is added to your website’s HTML, which helps search engines to better understand your website and rank it properly. However, black hat SEO misuses this feature by including untruthful information about their website in order to boost their rankings.
A common example of this is when websites use structured data to deceive users into thinking that they have many positive reviews for their products or services. In reality, these positive reviews could simply be fake ratings, testimonials, and comments that don’t actually reflect user experiences.
Negative SEO
All of the tactics that have been discussed have focused on tricking both users and search algorithms in order to get a better ranking, but black hat SEO professionals also try to do this by sabotaging the rankings of their competitors through negative SEO. Negative SEO refers to the use of unethical and malicious strategies to harm the rankings and online reputation of a competitor’s website. There are many ways that this can be done:
- Backlink Spamming: Creating many low quality and questionable backlinks that lead back to the competitor’s website, with the goal of having them penalized by search engines.
- Website Hacking: Getting unauthorized access to a competitor’s website in order to make changes that will negatively affect their performance, content, or security.
- Content Scraping and Duplication: Copying a competitor’s content and publishing this across the web in order to trigger duplicate content penalties from search engines.
- Fake Reviews: The publishing of fake reviews or testimonials on a competitor’s website in order to harm their online reputation, as well as their relationship with their consumers.
- Social Media Manipulation: Creating fake social media profiles to spread false information or bad reviews regarding a competitor.
Comment Spamming
Comment spamming is a black hat technique where individuals or automated bots flood the comment sections of blogs, forums, and other online platforms with a link to their website. The goal of this tactic is to manipulate their search engine rankings, gain backlinks, or promote a product or service that they’re offering. However, this is no longer as common as it used to be, with search engines and online platforms updating their algorithms to discount these links.
Private Blog Networks
With this black hat SEO technique, a network of websites is created with the primary purpose of link building and manipulating search engine rankings by exaggerating the number of backlinks that lead to a certain website. The websites within this network often cover various topics that are unrelated to the main website. These sites often have low quality content as their main focus is simply to include links that lead back to the primary website.
What are the Disadvantages of Using Black Hat SEO?
Aside from the fact that performing any black hat SEO techniques deliberately goes against the rules set by search engines, other consequences come from adopting these shady strategies. These are some of the consequences you can experience if you risk employing black hat SEO techniques.
Penalties From Search Engines
As mentioned earlier, those caught performing black hat SEO techniques can be penalized by search engines, but it doesn’t just stop there. By receiving a penalty from a search engine, your website will not only plummet in terms of search engine rankings but it could also be removed entirely—rendering all of your efforts useless and negatively affecting the performance and reputation of your website.
High Bounce Rates
Bounce rate refers to the number of users that leave your website after only a short period of time, and it’s something that you can expect when you practice black hat SEO. Black hat SEO is all about deceiving search engines into believing that a website is more useful than it really is, which means that your content is most likely going to be unhelpful for users who do click on it.
With no reason to stick around, users will immediately leave your website in favor of other more legitimate and trustworthy ones, leading to higher bounce rates that can drag your ranking down.
Poor Quality Content
With frowned-upon practices like keyword stuffing being prominent in black hat SEO, there’s no way that you’ll be able to produce and maintain high-quality content. By forcing keywords into every possible part of your website, your content will become unnatural and strange to read, which will automatically deter users and prompt them to visit another website instead.
Remember that users expect helpful and informative content, but your website won’t be able to offer that when you’re too busy trying to hit every keyword you can.
Short Term Results
Black hat SEO is all about instant and immediate results, especially when it’s impossible to maintain consistent progress when using such manipulative tactics. If you think about it, employing black hat SEO practices will get users into your website, but then what?
They’ll realize that your content is poorly written, completely unhelpful, and possibly even unrelated to what they were looking for, which results in poor engagement and user retention. Sure, you get a lot of clicks, but does that really matter when you can’t get them to stay?
Poor User Experience and Engagement
The whole point of starting a website or blog for your business is to better connect and engage with your customers, as well as reach out and bring in new ones, but employing black hat SEO strategies might be working against these goals.
When you trick your customers and readers into entering your website, only to give them absolutely nothing of value, it leaves them with a negative impression that will result in total avoidance of your brand altogether.
Not only are you wasting their time and not giving them anything worthwhile, but you’re also messing with the trust that they may have had in your business. Aside from losing your existing customers, black hat SEO is also likely to keep new ones away.
The Takeaway
While it’s understandable to want to attract more users and customers to your website, it’s also important to remember that you want to make a good impression on your audience and maintain their trust with high-quality content that actually gives them what they’re looking for and provides helpful and reliable information.
Black hat SEO techniques and strategies not only put you and your brand at risk of suffering serious consequences that could damage your search engine ranking and your reputation, but these deceptive methods also leave users with a negative experience with your brand that could drive away any potential customers, business, or profit you could have earned.
Choose ethical success with Cardinal Digital's white hat SEO services. Instead of risky black hat methods, our team is committed to optimizing your website with legitimate strategies for long-term success. Elevate your SEO game the right way – enhance visibility, improve rankings, and build a sustainable online presence with Cardinal Digital. Opt for ethical optimization for lasting results.
