Beware of Black Hat SEO Techniques

Getting your website to the top of Google’s search engine results is a great way to attract new clients but beware of SEO tricks and shortcuts which could damage your long-term rankings and reputation. In this article we explain black hat SEO techniques and how to avoid them.

Black hat SEO practices violate the search engines’ terms of service. In the early days of the Internet, your website could be ranked highly by using cheap tricks. You may still believe SEO is a form of ‘black magic’ that can be applied by those with technical skills to rise in the rankings. It’s important to know the black hat techniques you should avoid when improving the SEO. Websites that violate Google’s terms of service are penalized by its algorithms. Your website could be blacklisted and lose all SEO rankings if your website is found to be using black hat techniques.

Keyword Stuffing: Using repetitive keywords and unnecessary variations of a keyword to rank higher. Using too many keywords and phrases in the text does not add value to users’ experience.

Duplicate Content: Copies other websites’ content and pastes it on your own. Also, it refers to posting the same content on multiple pages on your website to rank for variations of a keyword. Content should be unique across different pages to meet the expectations of users.

Doorway Pages: Low-quality pages (or groups of pages, or entire websites) that are optimised to rank well for specific keywords. The purpose of these pages is merely to link to other pages on the website. The doorway page does not provide any original content or valuable information.

Link Schemes: Rankings are improved by backlinks. Search engines, however, prohibit buying and selling links (including sending free products). Do not exchange back links, buy/sell back links, or seek links from poor quality websites. Guest blogging is fine if it is not seen as excessive. Make sure you blog on websites that are relevant to your clients.

Cloaking: Users often see completely different content from what a search engine is showing (to rank the page or website well). A sneaky redirect refers to a black hat technique in which a search engine indexes one page, but users are taken to another. In both cases, the search engine is fooled into ranking the page by serving low quality/spammy content to users.

Any SEO provider offering you any of these types of black hat services should be avoided. You may be promised great results without much effort. These tactics, however, could cause long-term harm to your website and online presence. Investing in your website and online marketing presence for the long term is the key to SEO. Search engines will recognize your relevance if you provide high-quality content and an excellent user experience. Your SEO is likely to suffer more from short cuts such as those listed above.

Our approach to SEO at The Digital Coach is holistic and sustainable. This means avoiding black hat SEO techniques and improving all on-page and off-page factors that are known to affect rankings. To ensure we can offer the best advice, our SEO experts stay up to date with Google and other search engines’ latest guidelines. Our goal is to ensure that our clients attract attention for the right reasons and benefit from customer-centric search engine optimisation in the long term.