Google is the favorite marketing platform for most of the online users. The place where people start with the online search for their shopping, learning, entertaining, or anything. In turn, Google honors its users. It keeps scrutinizing and updating its search algorithms to make sure that it can provide as much as appropriate results what its users are looking for.
What’s the big deal, then?
After all, it is just an algorithm. Some webmasters are vigorous in influencing Google search results for their favors. For which, online publishers try to play some unfair tricks to achieve top ranking within short span somehow.
But, it’s a truth that it won’t work out for the long term. It brings you severe deadly risks that you might not have imagined. Stop those practices and just forget them forever.
Understanding What Black hat SEO is?
Obviously, SEO is the only factor that can transform your business growth online with lesser investment or sometimes even for free. But, you cannot expect it overnight. It takes a while to visualize the results.
SEO is not something that has written rules or workflow to follow and succeed. It’s a huge compilation of different levels of strategies and tactics in various aspects. Do you want your site to be loved by Google or any other search engines? Then you must do perfect SEO. Google will get organic traffic flows to your website.
On the other hand of the sphere, if you want to bypass the flow and desire to achieve top ranking within no time, then Google can spy you for sure and drop your rankings. Based on the level of gigs you commit, even your site will be nowhere in the SERP. I mean to say, site blocked.
The bad SEO practices that are illegal or against search engine algorithms you employ to dominate the SERP ranking faster refer to Black hat SEO.
For every action, there will be a reaction. Do you agree?
Considering the 200+ ranking factors that Google believe to rank any websites in the search engine results. It involves on-page SEO, authority, backlinks, content, local SEO, mobile-compatibility and so on.
Dishearten, it’s hard to say that will be a similar number of black hat SEO practices out there based on each ranking factor. For an instant, keyword stuffing in on-page, PBN’s if you think about authority, bad backlinks in terms of linking, etc. People are digging their time in finding ways to cheat search engines and especially users, for their individual benefits.
Most Risky Black-hat SEO Techniques to Avoid
Though there are hundreds of black hat SEO techniques available, here I am going to share the top most dangerous black hat SEO strategies that you must avoid. To build an online reputation and to reap consistent benefits online, you are insisted on practicing only white-hat SEO strategies.
#1 Cloaking
Cloaking is the practice of deceiving search engines by displaying different pages to users and search engines. That is delivering different content to search engines that your visitors are actually looking at. Cloaking is an awful SEO strategy that carries severe risks.
For an instant, displaying HTML based light pages to search engines that ranks higher and showing flash videos to the users. Also, your web coding makes Google think that you have content like kids rhymes collections, but your website shows information about selling kid’s wears.
Google can spot this kind of deceiving activities, and if identified, the consequence will be severe. Even you might be thrown out of the game.
#2 Content Spinning
People those who aware of the adverse consequences content duplication take content spinning in their hands. It is nothing but duplicating the content or writing the same articles for multiple times with different terminologies, alternative words, and synonyms.
This practice is most closely associated with content duplication. Unfortunately, Google is too smarter to figure these misbehaviors. Google’s Penguin Algorithm can smell it, and you are caught, then.
Both the search engines and users love fresh and unique content. Only with which you can prove your reliability and reputation online. If you are outsourcing content writing for your web pages, make sure it is not spun. There is abundant article spinning software available to make these marketers job easy.
#3 Bad Backlinking
Backlinks are crucial to improve your search engine ranking. But, the quality of the backlinks is more considerable than the volume of backlinks you have. Think about outsourcing your link building campaigns or buying paid links; you won’t be sure about your link quality and relevancy.
While rating your web pages, Google will run through your complete link profile. Based on the authority, relevancy and link value of your referring domains, Google trusts you and gives you reputation.
Buying bad links or building massive backlinks within a short period or getting backlinks on spam websites are no more appreciable.
Alternatively, you may prospect authority blogs in your niche, connect with the webmaster, build relationships and contribute guest blogging to generate influential backlinks.
#4 Keyword Stuffing
Keyword forms the foundation of SEO. All your search engine optimization efforts surround your target keywords. Over-optimizing your website content towards your focus keyword will result in keyword stuffing.
Roughly, you can have around 4 to 5 times your keyword in 1,000 words content.
Google or any other search engine can easily spy your bad on-page optimization and bring down your ranking.
The worst part is this will also affect your other interlinked pages. To avoid keyword stuffing, you may use more relevant or LSI keywords. Writing long-form of content enables you to include more focus keywords optimally.
#5 Spam Commenting
Backlinks are the votes of trust from other websites pointing to you. For the sake of just building backlinks, destructing your online reputations is a blunder mistake. While blog commenting, contributing spam content or including irrelevant, spammy links also come under black hat SEO practices.
Google gives more value to the user-generated content like in the blog comments section. If you are wisely throwing a genuine comment, then it’s a sign that you are a trustworthy and your website also. Search engine believes that you are having a healthier relationship with the webmaster.
Hence, make quality blog comments on other sites and also approve only genuine comments on your blog. Spam blog comments will ruin both the guest and the host domain’s reputation and ranking.
Final Take Away
Black hat SEO seems like fruitful, but behind the screen, it brings severe disasters. Recovering from such back-out would be big trouble. Sometimes, you can’t even.
Be the smartest and employ search engine optimization strategies that are in line with search engine algorithms. Be consistent in content creation; optimize your pages for fast loading and mobile usability; keep updated with the market trends, active in the community to reap the real benefits.
I admit SEO takes time to get your desired results. But, it will be stable. Don’t try shortcuts; travel in the right path for long term results.
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Have you practiced any of the black hat SEO techniques? How were the returns? Have you faced any severe drop in your ranking? Share your experience about it.
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A great post mate, you do a fantastic job of highlighting the main protagonists in the black hat world. At least, I believe that they are in the world of blogging. It is good to read this info, my friend. It is always nice to avoid them. Even though there is no question that they are a shortcut to better ranking, it is only a matter of time before Google catches up.
That is why I STAY AWAY FROM ANY POTENTIAL PENALTIES.
The shortcut will not last long. Also, what Black Hat method that works for you today will not work for you tomorrow. In such cases, it is always better to go with White Hat SEO methods. But, they have remained the same for over a decade. Just “Create Quality Content what Users Need”.
Great article, it is tackling all the valid points and for sure the method of content spinning I was not even aware of. I wonder if there are content plug-ins for our favorite CMS which do this job. Backlinking is one of my favorite topics, however also here I struggle on the good once and the bad once.
Yes, Dieter, we do have WordPress Plugins for Content Spinning. However, we don’t recommend this.
Dear Nirmal,
Thank you very much for the informative post. I am not in danger, because I don’t like cheating anyway. However, it’s very helpful to know what others may do in order to cheat SEO, or rather… most likely themselves. As a blogger myself, I learned from a “victim” experience about spam comments and fake backlinks. Interestingly, you’ve used as an example of spam-comment a comment written in my native language, which points to a free movies site. 🙂
Keyword stuffing is very annoying for me as an Internet user. As a blogger, I understand what some people are trying to do, but as a reader, I leave a site immediately as I see this practice. I am really glad that keyword stuffing is recognized by bots and is easily detectable. I hope that the website owners will eventually drop this cheating technique as it turns away both bots and human readers.
The two other techniques (Cloaking and Content Spinning) as well as the term “Black-hat SEO”, I’ve never even heard of.
So, I’ve learned a couple of new things today from your article. 🙂
All the best to you,
~ Julia
Thanks for your detailed comment, Julia.
Cloaking is usually done from the server side. You might have come across link cloaking, which we usually do in WordPress for affiliate links. We do this to avoid revealing our affiliate details. But, Search Engines and bots don’t like this. This is the reason, many SEO experts recommend not to index affiliate links. And content spinning has been a lot common. There are so many WordPress plugins available for this purpose.
And, I am glad you found this post very useful.