7 Black Hat Techniques You should avoid using in SEO
It is tempting to want to skip a few steps while working on SEO for your Website. We get it; it’s a long and tiring process. There will come a time when you will want to start using black hat techniques. These are a no-no for Google or any other search engine. So below you will find 10 black hat techniques you should avoid using in SEO.
1. Keyword Stuffing:
Keyword stuffing involves the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count and try to ‘fool’ the web crawlers into ‘thinking’ that a certain page is relevant to a certain topic just because a certain keyword is frequently used.
It’s like if this article had the current title and the body was just stuffed with the keyword “black hat techniques”. That Google crawlers believe that, since this article uses the keyword frequently, then it must be very relevant to this topic. Well, it used to be able to, now search engines have evolved to compare the keyword frequency of white hat article to that of a black hat.
2. Hidden or invisible text:
Another sneaky black hat technique is that of the invisible or hidden text in an article. The un-related or hidden text is disguised by making it the same colour as the background of the article. Another way to hide text is to use very tiny font size to make it almost undetectable to the human eye.
Hiding it within HTML code as “no frame” sections or “all attributes” and “no script” sections are just a few creative ways to hide text.
This might seem like a foolproof way to get the crawlers to emphasize greater relevance on your article or page. Maybe you might get away with it, but if you are caught, your page could be permanently removed.
3. Meta-Tag Stuffing:
This black hat technique consists of filling the meta-tags with keywords. It has been inefficient since 2006 so best not to even think about using it.
4. Doorway Pages:
Doorway pages are a black hat technique that cost a big company dearly. A doorway page is basically a page that is stuffed with keywords and no information on a specific topic whatsoever. It will only have an enter button that will send you to the relevant page. Google penalised the car giant BMW because it used doorway pages to lead visitors to its main German site.
5. Scraper Sites:
Scraper sites are created using different programs that are designed to “scrape” good search engine result pages or other sources of content. They then create “content” for a website. The content might look unique, but it’s just an amalgamation of scraped content made to look like a great article or page. Sometimes these sites are higher ranked than original ones. Using this technique has major consequences if caught.
6. Article Spinning:
Article spinning involves re-writing an existing article, rather than scraping it. This usually has no repercussions from Google. It isn’t as effective because the original article will have a better chance to remain higher on the value scale to Google.
7. Machine Translation:
This black hat technique is similar to article spinning. It consists of using machine translation to translate an article or page, often horribly, in many languages. This is done in hope that Google will consider the different languages as different articles. It seldom works.
At Utopian Designs, we are always against black hat techniques. We believe that reaching the top of Google with perseverance and hard work is so much sweeter in the end. Contact us at sales@utopiandesigns.co and we will help with your SEO free of charge.
