5 Dreaded Black Hat SEO Practices You Must Avoid

With the development of Google search, requirement on optimizing content (SEO) emerged and from there, the birth of what is mostly known as black hat SEO or negative SEO. The real SEO that has been in existence even before the birth of black hat SEO, came to be known as white hat SEO. White hat SEO is the best way to optimize a webpage, and you can find a company providing white hat SEO on a site like whitehat-seo.co.uk.

What about the black hat SEO? What is Black Hat SEO?

Well, of course, it’s the vice-versa; the not so rightful way of search engine optimization of a webpage. White hat SEO refers to the ethical way of link building and managing a search engine (thereby user) friendly websites and blogs, in order to get long lasting ranking results. On the contrary, Black hat SEO refers to all those unethical practices that seem to successfully dodge Google’s smartness but ultimately get the blog or website flagged. Being first in SEO matters, especially being first in your prospects Google search; but not by using negative SEO.

Hence bearing in mind that there is nothing or no one smarter that Google in the internet world, try to avoid these Black Hat SEO mistakes that can drastically decrease your blog’s Page Rank.

Content Spinning:

Content spinning refers to the way some bloggers, webmasters or content writers spin an already existing and original article with the hope of blindfolding Google and drastically degrading their work load. A content generated by spinning is apparently fresh, but is in-fact a copy of another pre-existing article. Google’s algorithms are now fine tuned to the extent that it can detect a spun content much more effectively than before.

Keyword Stuffing:

The last day I was fetching for the lyrics of a classic number. I bumped into a blog giving me those lyrics. While I was singing along, I came across the name of the song in between incomplete sentences. Also, the text’s font was different from that of the rest of the text. I pondered upon the existence of such words pop from the middle of nowhere, only to learn that it was a black hat SEO trick which used to get the page ranked higher in the search engines. This is the most basic SEO mistake one commits. So did that blog.

Hiding Stuff:

This is the black hat SEO process in which certain keywords are typed in an invisible color (for instance in white font color for a white template background). This way, the words are not seen by human eyes, but since they are present in the blog’s or website’s code, they get noticed by the search engine. These words are generally the keywords that the blogger or webmaster wants that page to have in order to increase the page’s or post’s keyword density.

Page Swapping:

This is another black hat SEO technique that is specifically designed to cheat the search engine. It is the method used to get certain content to the notice of search users, which seems to give them some result, but shows them something else, as the page they are seeking for is now swapped with another (which the bloggers wants them to see). Didn’t get what I mean? Here is an example –

A blog has a well indexed page that successfully attained a great Page Rank and appears on the first pages of a search engine for targeted keywords. Now, the bloggers wants to take undue advantage of his success with the page, and he swaps a major part of the content of that well ranking page with an affiliate product that he earns promoting.

Masked Links:

As the term suggests, masked links are those that are covered with something to avoid the real identity.

For instance, a link on an SEO blog says,

“Buy our SEO services to get natural organic traffic to your blog”

But, links to an affiliate’s page that may contain anything off-topic, may be considered a masked link. The motto behind having such links can be passing on Page Rank, or misleading readers. It may also imply that that particular blog might be a link farm.

Now that you are aware of some Black Hat SEO tricks, do your best to avoid them. And if you already are immersed deep into such practices, I insist that you hire an SEO consultant to clean up the mess for you.