Black Hat SEO: SEO Bad Practices

Content Marketing 07 July 2022

Black Hat is the attempt to improve SEO through “shortcuts” to trick Google, Bing and the other search engines. While this can achieve significant peaks in the short term, it does not keep the sites well positioned and you run the risk of being penalized.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the many practices that are carried out as an online marketing strategy. Its function is to develop and improve the contents published on the different platforms, adapting to the interests, preferences and needs of users, with the aim of gradually raising the positioning in search engines.

Many practices that were previously widely used, today turn out to be the least recommended when it comes to persuading these search engines. That is why this article we will mention some of those that have become obsolete and you should avoid at all costs.

Black Hat SEO is about avoiding fraudulent techniques

If you want to know more about Black Hat SEO, visit us on Kiwop.

Copy or duplicate content

One of the most common practices is to copy other people’s content with good positioning and use them as your own. However, search engines have several techniques to detect plagiarism quickly and penalize the content, even reaching expulsion from sites.

Copying content also includes using it more than once within the same website. In these cases, only one of the pages will be indexed.

This happens because search engines want the content of their users to always be of quality and, above all, original, with the aim of obtaining a natural positioning. In case of using content from another website, the source from which the information was obtained must be placed or the author must be cited.

Abusing keywords

keyword
Keyword abuse can be harmful

At first, the use of keywords was very effective when it came to positioning ourselves within the web, since it was considered that they could greatly facilitate the search of users. However, this made the contents of poor quality, as they were not aimed at users but at search engines.

Nowadays, keywords are not a determining factor. Search engines sacrificed these facilities in order to improve the content offered and, therefore, the user experience.

If you do not correctly manage the use of keywords and saturate your contents with them, search engines can penalize you, since it interprets that you try to deceive users. The recommendation is that the number of keywords is between 2% to 6% of the total content.

Another very common mistake is to use irrelevant words, that is, those that are placed without reason and that are not related to each specific content. This can cause the engines themselves not to recognize the pages where the subject is actually discussed, all have the same weight and, as a consequence, none can be positioned.

Don’t waste your time searching for the right words to put on your page. Write naturally and focus on creating useful and interesting content for your users. To do this correctly, you can research about keywords that will be able to attract the attention of your audience.

If you want to know how to analyze keywords, visit us on Kiwop.

Use hidden texts and links

The use of hidden links is known as “cloacking”. This practice is summarized in placing content only visible to search engines.

Thus, more keywords and content can be included, for example by placing the same color as the background, in order to obtain a better positioning without the user visualizing them.

This causes the user to appear in their search results content that is not related to what they wanted to find.

Overdoing it with advertising

While including ads and advertising on your website can generate great income, using them excessively can cause several consequences.

Among them, we find a worse user experience. This can cause them to run out and decide to leave the web, causing that finally the content that was desired to show can never reach them.

On the other hand, this can compromise speed. A slow web page, where loading times are excessive, also translates into poor navigation for the user and a possible abandonment of the website.

Purchase and exchange of links

link exchange
Link sharing is very important

A good SEO practice is to place links in the contents of the web. This happens because search engines consider that if a site has many external links, it is because its content is interesting and reliable.

However, the fact of paying for links that point to your website, but that are not related to the contents, generates inconsistencies that the engines can detect and penalize, thinking that they have been obtained fraudulently.

If you want to legitimately increase your visits, you should not use artificially generated links, but they should be reliable, quality, earned naturally and must be related to our content.

It is estimated that it is better to have few links of good quality and authority, than with many of low quality that can not only not improve your positioning, but worsen your visibility.

Spinning

spinning
Spinning is a tactic that consists of updating keywords

This tactic involves updating the keywords of original texts on our own website, sometimes through software. In this way, it is possible to obtain a “new” article quickly and that can be published in several pages.

This type of practice is usually one of the least penalized by engines. However, if it is created by a machine, it will be considered of a worse quality than that produced by a human being.

SPAM through comments

Another technique used is to comment on a link in bulk in those blogs or forums with open comments. The only purpose of this is to create SPAM and generate links to our website easily. These types of comments are quickly removed and penalized if they are considered to contribute nothing to the content.

Currently, many blogs have the well-known nofollow links that allow search engines not to follow or review this type of links.

In addition, there are anti-spam tools that you can use on your website so that users do not take advantage of its contents. You must make sure and control that the comments section does not allow you to attach these links, since you will be harmed and the engines will delete your site.

Conclusion

We can conclude that, thanks to Black Hat SEO and any practice that is used with the aim of deceiving or forcing search engines, they can end up generating more consequences than benefits.

We must be aware that web positioning is progressive, requires effort, needs proper training, and that the best way to achieve this is by carrying out ethical and organic techniques that generate the best possible user experience. In this way, search engines will benefit and reward your site.

Gina Parente, member of the team of professionals from materialesdefabrica.com and habitium.com.

Comentario

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

We help you get results

If you want to have the website you want or increase the online visibility of your brand, we know how to do it.

Shall we start today?