Watch Out for These 5 Indications of Black Hat SEO

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Black hat is a practice that defies search engine guidelines to gain high rankings in Google. These results to a penalty from search engines. Most of the time, a site is not aware that they are afflicted. While it is true that in the beginning, a site will really rank high in Google. Eventually, search engines will downgrade it for such unethical practices.

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What does Black Hat SEO mean?

  • SEO is a procedure of designing a site with the aim of ranking high in search engines like Google. It is an imaginative means of “optimizing” content to gain organic traffic as oppose to paying advertising fees, which could be expensive.
  • When you do website optimization, there are two kinds: the white and the black hat SEO. The white hat SEO utilize lawful means to rank high. Black hat SEO intend towards search engines and not people which could misguide the algorithms and the users.

Today, Google and the other search engines has advanced algorithms to help find black hat SEO. Here are some black hat SEO schemes you should know:

Paid links

  • Google defines a paid link when it is paid by either goods or money. Nowadays, Google gives a considerable resources to close paid links and link farms. To determine this, take a look at the “anchor text,” the text or phrase that contains the link.
  • If text is irregular with no association to the link, it could be a bought link. Take a look at the number of links on each page.  “Keyword stuffing” happens when a keyword is used in an excessive number of times. These keywords they used may be a popular so this ensures that Google search ranking is high. If you repeat the same keyword on the title, the meta description, or anywhere in your content, that is keyword stuffing. To not be penalized for keyword stuffing, avoid using the keywords multiple times.

Hidden Links

  • Just how like the name suggests, it is a type of link that you cannot see. Google emphasizes on these things:  putting a hidden text behind an image, adding a text with a 0 font size, inserting a series of white texts on a white background with white text. Basically, you are being sneaky adding texts or links that can’t be easily detected by the human eye. More on 9 Bad Links That Can Get You in Trouble.

Cloaking and Redirects

  • When websites present two distinct content to search engines and to users, that is clocking. Meanwhile, if you have experienced clicking on a website and ended up in another website, that is called a “sneaky redirect.”
  • For cloaking, let’s say that search engine will see plain texts while the user can clearly see images. So, there is a clear difference between what the search engines and users see on your website.

Black Hat SEO will harm your Google Rankings in the long run.

Three things you learned here: 1) hire a good SEO firm for your website, 2) build educative content, and 3) follow Google’s guidelines at all times. Apply these three tips and you will never go wrong.