Your website needs to rank highly in search engines to attract a targeted audience. If people can’t find your website, it doesn’t matter how valuable your information is or how excellent of a service you deliver.
As a result, many people resort to aggressive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices and solely focus on search engines rather than a human audience. You may use various unethical and questionable shady methods to boost your website’s position in search engine rankings. “Black hat” SEO refers to these kinds of tactics.
What is Black Hat SEO?
To increase a website’s visibility in search engine results, some webmasters would resort to “black hat SEO” techniques that are against the terms of service of the respective search engines.
To put it simply, black hat SEO is any technique intended to trick search engines into ranking sites higher than they ought to.
Why Avoid Them?
There are substantial drawbacks and no guarantees of success when using black hat SEO techniques. Here are a few reasons you should be discouraged from employing these practices.
Black hat SEO strategies can result in a penalty from Google. If your website receives a penalty, it could see a drop in search engine rankings or, in the worst situation, be removed entirely from Google’s index.
As such, potential customers won’t be able to see your website when they search for products or services related to yours. Moreover, most visitors will leave your site because of the spammy appearance of the information on your pages. To promote a positive user experience, search engines will de-list your site after receiving too many unfavorable reviews.
Pay-per-click advertising solutions like Good Ads are a viable alternative to unethical SEO strategies. It doesn’t work like SEO and won’t boost your organic search ranks. Instead, Google Adverts can show your ads to potential clients while browsing for a business like yours.
In terms of advertising, the United States is the world’s biggest advertiser. In 2021, the country spent almost $285 billion on advertisements alone. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom spends the most on internet ads. There is a body in the UK dedicated to digital advertising called the Internet Advertising Bureau UK.
On the other side, Australia was able to pull through the pandemic and improve upon its 2019 figures by $270 million in 2021. In fact, several Melbourne agencies are among Google Premier Partners in Australia that can help you stand out to your target audience.
Many Google Ads agency Melbourne make it their mission to deliver ethical and transparent recommendations to Australian businesses.
Most Common Black Hat SEO Practices to Avoid
Using such deceptive methods is likely to get you penalized by search engines and does nothing to help the user. For this reason, you must be familiar with the many forms of black hat SEO methods so that you can avoid them.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the excessive use of keywords in the content to trick search engines into thinking that it’s relevant to a particular query. Site owners may choose to conceal specific keywords in their content. However, search engine crawlers will still read the concealed keywords, even if the readers can’t see them.
Google constantly improves and can detect when content has been artificially boosted through keywords. Google’s goal is to provide helpful information. Thus it prioritizes content that contains a large number of semantically related keywords.
Paid Links
If your site is relatively new, it may be challenging to get links. It is the reason why many SEOs invest in buying links. In addition, it’s common practice for SEO-focused businesses to pay to have their content and links featured on various websites and blogs.
On the other hand, Google strictly forbids linking to websites that charge money. The greater a website’s budget for buying links, the more backlinks it will have, which will boost the position of both the website and the pages it links to higher on search engine results pages.
Cloaking
With cloaking, users see different content than what is shown to search engine crawlers. Cloaking tricks search engine crawlers into giving a page a higher page rank than it deserves by making it appear to contain material unrelated to the page’s actual subject matter.
Cloaking is the practice of disguising the actual content of a website (usually images or Flash files) behind a website version that is only visible to search engines.
False Redirects
A redirect takes a user to a different URL from the one they clicked on. Web admins use them when switching web addresses or merging multiple sites into one. There’s no reason to avoid them if they help keep your site neat and accessible to visitors and search engine bots.
Yet, like cloaking, false redirects trick crawlers into thinking they’re seeing something other than what they are. As a result, search engines will still index the original page even if users are redirected to a different URL.
Poor Quality Content
Since producing high-quality material is tough, some unethical SEOs produce large quantities of low-quality content to play the system. Poor content could be a rewritten version of a previously published piece or the product of a computerized paraphrasing tool.
Fast-written content like this is often employed in outreach or link-building campaigns.
Final Thoughts
Investing in legitimate means, such as Google Ads and similar services, ensures a future return. However, if you use shady SEO methods, you risk having your site penalized and seeing no returns at all.
