5 Black Hat Tactics That Will Ruin Your SEO Efforts
Every website owner seeks greater visibility for its website. Most businesses will either engage in white hat tactics or black hat tactics to do so. White hat tactics are generally promoted and proclaimed, however, utilising black hat tactics to improve the SEO and attract visitors are highly risky for your website’s popularity. Black hat tactics are violation of various search engine’s terms and conditions. Regular updates to search engine algorithms means it usually isn’t long before they are picked up on. Participating in black hat tactics can be risky, and even devastating for the future of your website’s SEO. Below, we’ve outlined 5 black hat tactics that will ruin your SEO efforts.
Keyword Stuffing and Over-Optimising
Over-optimisation of a website to get a better ranking of different search engines may be counterproductive for the website’s viewership. Using techniques such as keyword stuffing should be avoided as it gets penalised on different search engines. Additional practices such as over optimisation of images or alt description, over utilisation of internal and external links, and hidden links, among others should be avoided.
Cloaking
A second common tactic used by black hat SEO’s is cloaking. Cloaking is where the site owner tricks the search engine into displaying results where the content is not relevant. In essence, the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser. This approach to manipulating SERP’s may backfire and reduce the ranking of your website.
Comment Spam
The practice of leaving spam comments across a huge range of websites is one of the biggest black hat tactics. So much so, that it often isn’t even done manually, since there are tools that can do it for you. Often, black hat SEO’s will leave irrelevant comments on various websites or posts, that aren’t related to the content, and just have a link to a website, product or service.
Most of the time, these links carry no link juice, and are no-follow. This means that not only is it a black hat tactic for which you could be penalised for, but the activity itself is pretty much a waste of time.
Article Spinning
Article spinning is kind of similar to producing duplicate content, only that you are taking someone else’s work and essentially paraphrasing it, and re-using it as your own. Plagiarism in any form is wrong, and therefore it’s not surprising that search engines could penalise you if you get caught article spinning. Make sure you are creating unique, original and valuable content!
Creating paid links
One of the most well known black hat tactics includes creating paid links such as buying and selling links, paid advertisements to bypass the authorities, and listing on low quality directories. These tactics can de-index your website and thereby significantly hamper the volume of traffic to your website. If you are looking to outsource your link-building efforts, make sure you are using a reputable SEO company.