Ever been approached by a SEO executive who pitched, “Would you like to reach 10 million customers in a few days?” If so, you might have wondered, “Is that even possible? Because I haven’t heard of a SEO technique we could use to achieve such results!”
For a long time, we’ve been wondering why some websites rule the first page of search results for a week and then suddenly you don’t come across them anymore for months and maybe never.
What happened to this website? Why isn’t it showing anymore? Didn’t it always have the answers to the question I regularly look up? The answer is, even the most helpful pages can lose their stance on the top search results if they practice what is known as Black Hat SEO.
So, what exactly is it and how can it affect your business? We asked Karl Paul, Executive Chairman of Smarter Media Ltd for a definition.
“Black Hat SEO refers to practises that seek to rank websites in search results by using techniques that are not in accordance with the rules for webmasters established by search engines.”
“While it is feasible to obtain high rankings for a website using black hat SEO techniques in a short amount of time, these acts are immoral and potentially hazardous to the proper operation of the website. Instead of designing a website with people in mind, this approach focuses on optimising it for search engines.”
Let’s drill down into common Black Hat techniques, which include:
- Keyword stuffing – repetition of page’s target keywords, usually excessively.
- Auto generated content – having multiple pages with the same content.
- Hidden text – using text color same as background, using zero font size, or using CSS to format text in a way that it is unreadable.
- Doorway pages – creating pages that act as a funnel to another.
- Cloaking – providing different content to users instead of what they’re looking for.
- Paid links – paying to attain links for SEO purposes.
- Misused structured data and rich snippets – using extra data retrieved from the structured data from the page’s HTML.
- Misleading directs – providing false or misleading information to gain traffic.
- Negative SEO – Hacking, building many spammy links, creating fake accounts to ruin the reputation of another, pointing links to your website using words like poker, and many more.
Engaging in such practices or allowing another party to use these techniques for increasing your web traffic comes with more risks, such as:
- Having a negative impact on your website’s visibility
- Using black hat SEO techniques can lead to decline in search appearance due to manual action or filtering of algorithms
- Results don’t last
- Black Hat techniques don’t guarantee a long-term stance in top search results. Tracking the progress of your website’s traffic works well if there is true predictability, and using black hat SEO rules this out because once you are caught, you could go from 100 to zero.
- Apart from results and visibility, using Black SEO techniques causes poor user experience and that is something a user definitely would not want to encounter when trying to negotiate your website.
We all want to grow our businesses digitally and there are many ethical ways to get the traffic we need. Following our advice and avoiding unethical SEO techniques can save you from damaging the potential opportunities for your business out there.