In their attempts to improve their SEO and get a better rank, website owners sometimes employ certain practices that go against the terms of service of search engines. These techniques tend to backfire and cause your site to lose a good ranking position.
For this reason, we suggest only using proven, white hat methods that will guarantee success in the long run. Unfortunately, some designers are still tempted to take shortcuts that can put their websites in danger. Here are seven risky black hat SEO techniques to avoid and be aware of.
1. Keyword Stuffing
One of the oldest tactics used for gaming the system was adding crazy amounts of keywords to the pages of your website. Web designers would determine which keywords customers are likely to use and then repeat them in as many ways as possible. This results in a text which is hard to read and doesn’t come across as natural.
However, the main goal of this technique isn’t to make quality content. Instead, this technique attempts to inflate a website’s rank and trick search engines into thinking the page is important. It should be noted that these kinds of pages are not user-friendly, and search engines have gotten better at recognizing out-of-place keywords. This makes keyword stuffing one of the most hazardous black hat SEO techniques to avoid.
2. Duplicate Content
The latest marketing buzzword has become content marketing; however, creating quality content is hard and time-consuming. Some attempt a simple copy and paste technique to artificially increase the number of pages on their site to cut corners.
The copied content sometimes comes from other websites, and sometimes it is just duplicated from existing pages on the same domain. While neither of these techniques is good, taking someone else’s content and presenting it as your own is a more serious offense.
Unfortunately, some website owners make this mistake by accident. They sometimes use automatically generated pages for their products or services. Unless they go and manually add helpful content, those pages will be clones of one another. Even when done by accident, duplicated content can cause you to lose rank.
3. Article Spinning
This can be seen as a variation of the previous technique. However, with article spinning, you aren’t directly stealing someone’s content by simply copying it. Instead, small changes are made, and the copied articles are re-worded to sound like new content.
This allows website owners to quickly create a large number of seemingly ‘unique’ content. The truth is that the resulting content is rarely interesting or engaging and can actually hurt your SEO.
4. Cloaking
Cloaking rchanges around delivering completely different versions of your pages to search engines and users. When search engines crawl and index your pages, they get delivered a highly optimized version with keywords and other text, which is meant to achieve a high rank.
Afterward, users are pointed to other pages and served different content. This is considered a highly manipulative tactic, and Google has a special cloaking penalty for websites that try to deceive users.
Once your website suffers this kind of penalty, you will have a long-term drop in organic traffic which can be hard to recover from. Your best course of action is to know which kinds of risky black hat SEO techniques to avoid and create genuinely interesting pages that both users and search engines will like.
5. Link Farms and Paid Links
Building quality backlinks is a proven and essential SEO technique. However, it’s also slow, and it takes a long time to bring measurable results. There are shady marketing companies that offer to sell you a large number of backlinks.
Be aware that those kinds of links probably aren’t worth your time. Google has become good at spotting paid links, and the algorithm now pays more attention to the quality of your backlinks than the raw number.
However, if you own multiple companies and websites, you can use them to coordinate your marketing efforts. Keep in mind that private blog networks (PBNs) can improve your ratings, but they fall under grey hat techniques.
As such, they are sometimes frowned upon by search engines, and they can be a bit risky. Instead of purchasing links and falling into the grey-hat-techniques-in-SEO category, you can opt for this instead: create links on all of your smaller sites to support your main endeavor.
6. Invisible or Hidden Text
Hiding a part of the text of your pages represents an alternative to keyword stuffing. Instead of letting users see gibberish text that is only meant for search engines, some designers try to use clever tricks to hide that text.
They can make the text invisible by having the color match the background, setting the font size to zero, or even hiding the text behind an image or other page element.
These are all risky black hat SEO techniques to avoid, and we don’t recommend attempting them. Search engines have gotten good at spotting hidden text and recognize it as another way of stuffing keywords.
7. Doorway Pages
This technique is sometimes also known as Gateway pages, and it is based on creating a single page that can entice users to visit your site. That page is optimized to rank in search results, and it serves as a funnel to lure visitors to your site.
Doorway pages are easy to recognize since they rarely offer any value themselves. Instead of creating pages intended to trick users into visiting your site, every page on your website should serve a purpose.
If you realize that certain pages on your website don’t contribute to a good user experience, it might be time to redesign your site. A good test would be to draw out your website on paper and then explain the purpose of every page.
The Bottom Line
We always recommend that web designers only stick to white hat SEO tactics. If you do things by the book, you will ensure a high rank without risking a penalty. Now that we’ve given you a list of 7 risky black hat SEO techniques to avoid, you can recognize the potential pitfalls and do things the right way.
