Updated May 31, 2023
What is Black Hat SEO?
Most of our readers have in their lifetime, or most probably the college guys, have played computer games in their life or college life. They know what ‘Cheat Codes’ is – it is malfunctioning techniques used by the players to win the game easier to rank themselves higher. Today’s topic has similar intentions to the players and the technique they use. The black hat SEO technique has a similar set of stories.
Black hat SEO is a wrong set of practices performed by the players (or users) who wish to rank their websites higher in the search engine. This set of practices often leads to penalty and end up creating problems for the users. This article will discuss in detail what are these techniques and the pros and cons associated with them.
Black Hat SEO techniques
Like we said earlier, it is a wrong way of promotions; the black hat SEO manipulates the search engine algorithms to give quick but non-lasting results to its users and often leads to completely wiped-out from being listed in the search engine. But the million-dollar question is why people prefer to use it despite its bad reputation?
In Black hat SEO techniques, there are some tested methods/techniques; let us first witness them –
Remember, these techniques are good to have until you are not caught by Google (or any other search engines).
1. Keyword Stuffing: There is a prescribed keyword density (a good practice), but people manipulate them thinking of gaining additional benefits. Keyword stuffing means adding irrelevant keywords to the content. This creates a bad impression on users as they do not find any useful information.
Let us see an Example –
“We are into the business of the real estate. We deal in real estate. If you want to buy real estate property, get in touch with our real estate consultant. Real estate consultant will guide you about real estate property”.
The above statement has overused the keyword without complete or relevant details. Google (we are using in general) will easily spot this kind of behaviour which seems more of a broken record. You can focus on a topic with relevant details rather than filling in unhealthy content.
2. Cloaking: it means a kind of dual behaviour to two different mediums. With medium, we mean to say search engine bot and users. In this case, the websites try to show one piece of information content to users and different content to the search engine bot. The website owners practice this to make the content rank for various terms, which is irrelevant. The best practice is to treat the search engine bot similar to a user with similar content.
3. Sneaky Redirects: Let us take an example to understand this false SEO technique better. Let us take this link – www. company name-aboutus. As a user, if we try clicking this link to know the company identity, we find ourselves landing in some content, which is what redirects try to do? Black hat SEO user’s redirect outside of the content. They will redirect the search engine crawler to some other destination whereas to the users to some other destination. This is a violation of the search engine guidelines.
4. Poor Quality content: There are different scenarios built under this topic; let us see them.
- Copied content from other websites.
- Invisible keywords.
- A black hat SEO practicing user will create the content with keywords colour similar to the website page background color. Here is what happens is the website is getting listed for those hidden keywords. Still, a user will not find any valuable information because the word color is similar to the background colour.
- Once you have ranked your page for a certain keyword, and later on, you will change the content with some other content.
All these practices negatively impact the users as they don’t get what they are looking for.
5. Link Farms: The name gives a bit of an idea of what this practice is all about. Here they will interlink a group of websites to each other. One website gives a link to its counterpart, which is all interlinked. This is against the rules prescribed by Google (in general). Once they are caught, these websites are penalized will low raking.
Advantages
When using Black hat SEO techniques, we would like to say that one should not practice them at all. Reasons supporting our statement are due to the advancement of search engine algorithms. Just like a Black hat, SEO guys are willing to do business with false strategy. Similarly, GOOGLE people are also doing their business, and these techniques hamper their business.
As we said, search engine algorithms have really become very advanced in recent days (with the coming of the panda, hummingbird, and others). Finally, just to add in the advantages section, you are only good to practice these tricks until you are not caught. The penalty will lead you to poor ranking, black listening, and completely wiping out the search results.
Problems with Black hat SEO
As a business, you will definitely look for short-term success. The problems with using this technique are not many, but the ones that actually are will blow your mind. The consequence is really disastrous.
Let us witness them –
- Do not last long
- Not a genuine technique
- Penalty once gets caught.
Conclusion
The Black hat SEO technique is not illegal but is still against the rules of search engines. If still, you wish to use it for lesser profit and short-term success, then get ready to be penalized sooner or later. The consequences will be nasty, and you will end up in a poor business ratio, which was not your intent before you started to practice back hat SEO techniques.
The search engines are getting better with every passing day, and you should not practice it as you are not giving any value to the users and the search engines. But we will conclude our discussion by saying that just like every coin has two faces – positive/good v/s negative/bad these will stay in the market for no good reason.
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