Black hat SEO tactics attempt to deceive people as well as search engines by spamming. On the other hand, businesses with long term vision invest in White Hat SEO tactics that leads to healthy online growth, why? As good SEO builds on organic online marketing strategies, it presents relevant information to brands’ target audiences.
Why Bad SEO Hurts & Good SEO Works.
Here is a list of few black hat SEO strategies, their ill-effects and ethical tactics that can be used in their place.
1. Cloaking
Cloaking is the practice of misleading the search engine by showing different content to Google. Once the link is clicked, the user is navigated to some other content or web page than the one they think, they must be going on. For example, your web code makes Google think you are directing users to cricket match updates site. But the fact is that your website publishes information about sales on women beauty products and accessories. Cloaking will not only hurt your website ranking, but it can even render banning your site completely from the search engine.
What to Do:Â
As an Ethical SEO practice, create Web pages that your visitors want and expect to see. Navigate them to proper pages based on the description on the search engine results page (SERP).
Example:Â You wish to promote women beauty products and accessories. Create web pages on latest fashion trends where you can highlight celebs and suggest how your products can help buyers get similar looks.
2. Link-exchanges
Doing link exchanges can really dilute your website’s rankings. Instead of improving your website ranking, link exchanges are more likely to put your SEO efforts to waste. Hence, it better that websites focus on building links naturally, rather than exchanging links which are mostly low quality and irrelevant.
What to do?
There are a couple of good places on the web where you can look for links. Check out popular forums from your industry and post information about your website. Connect with the right audiences there you will receive a good amount of links and visitors too.
3. Duplicate Content &Â Search Engines
Duplicating or copying content from another website is one of the worst Black Hat SEO techniques. Search engines index the ‘original’ content only once. Google’s Panda Update can easily detect copied text or articles or automatically generated content and dilute your rankings. Moreover, Google search engine algorithms are modified frequently to index original and unique content only. Hence, all plagiarized content goes to waste. Therefore, focus your SEO efforts on creating unique and original content for your readers and not search engines.
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What to Do?
Focus on writing useful and relevant content that attracts more and more targeted audience. Consider citing sources in your content. Write sentences with a reasonable keyword density. Encourage semantically related words and avoid repetitions.
4. Buying Links
Although links are said to be an 80% determinant for ranking, Google’s Penguin Update helps in penalizing spam websites who buy links in exchange of money. Such sites not only suffer in rankings, but the other sites that paid to be featured on them were also penalized.
What to Do?
Agreed, link building can be daunting for any business. But so is earning a good brand recognition, isn’t it? Employ your offline brand building strategies to the online world and you will earn good quality links soon enough.
5. Keyword Stuffing
Including keywords after every 2 or 3 sentences on every page will not only spam your website but it will annoy your search engine crawler and your site visitors. Hence, include only relevant and balanced quantity of keyword and tags in your website.
What to do?
Remember, the content you write is not just for search engines. Your buyers will probably read it too. Write valuable content with meaningful sentences and have a reasonable keyword density.
6. Hidden text
Hidden text implies writing white text on a white background. However, one must bear in mind that even though such text are not visible to human eye, Google’s bots can have an automated system that goes through your source code to trace even the slightest of error.
What to Do?
Write content that is intended to be read. The color of the text must be in contrast with the background and the links should be obvious. Ensure that your source code and logs are ‘hidden text-free’ to avoid any penalty.
7. Link farms
A site or a group of sites that exist for increasing the link popularity of another site by the medium of link exchanges is called Link farms. Google hates unrelated links and link farming. Hence, avoid link farms rather than hurting your rankings.
What to Do?
Avoid them. Conduct an SEO audit and request your links be removed from “bad-pages” or “bad-sites”.
Why Good SEO Works
As you can see in the above examples, good SEO helps crawlers
- Index content appropriately
- Creates level playing field for brands
- Respects authentic work and efforts taken
- Matches user search intent with best results
- Makes sure the best and “Most Relevant” content gets seen
Finding Best SEO Company
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