With increasing number of businesses the need to gain more
visitors has increased and in order to do so, people have started taking
illegal measures to gain visitors to their company, which is no at all
appreciated. The present time is the era of Digital Marketing and with the
influence of the internet in the market, pretty much everything is online these
days and that leads to lots of positives and reduced human effort involved in
every task. With the incoming of website culture, every business is trying to
attract customers through its online presence and that is the reason a lot of
digital marketing strategies have come into use. And since SEO which is an
acronym for Search Engine Optimization, plays an important role in the ranking
of any website on the search engine page results, many companies have been
trying to use various strategies to get good organic results in the ranking of
the website.
Similar to a coin which has two phases, SEO techniques can
also be classified as White Hat SEO and Black Hat
SEO techniques, which is
understood by the name, White Hat techniques are the fair any organic use of
strategies and tactics to gain more visitors to the page and ultimately for the
search engine ranking. Thus this is the technique which follows all the guidelines
from the SEO and takes measures to organically provide the good ranking to the
website. Whereas when we talk about Black Hat SEO techniques, it is clear by
the name that it is illegal to use of practices to gain visitors to the website
and such practices may look good for short period of time but are not good for
the longer run. It might lead to risks in your business and its market status.
Now some of you might not be very familiar with the concepts
of Black Hat SEO, so in this article, we will discuss all Black Hat SEO such
as:
What is Black Hat
SEO?
What are techniques
used in Black Hat SEO?
And finally, after we know in detail about this concept we
will discuss- “ How to protect your
business from Black Hat SEO techniques? ”
Now let us first dig deep into the proper definition of
Black Hat SEO. It is basically SEO technique which is used to increase the
website ranking by the use of unfair SEO techniques which comes under false
practices and strategies, Black Hat SEO basically focuses on the Search Engine
response rather than the human audience and their demands and it fails to obey
guidelines provided by the search engine. Due to the use of illegal strategies
such as keyword stuffing, invisible text/ links, adding unrelated keywords to
the website and page swapping, Black Hat technique strategies are not advised
to be used, it is mostly used by people who are looking for short time
financial wealth. But these practices are dangerous and could even lead to the
banning of your website, which will ultimately result in the bad online
reputation in the market. Black Hat SEO is also sometimes referred to as
Unethical SEO or Spamdexing.
Since we have got an insight into the definition of Black
Hat SEO, let's have a detailed look at the techniques used in Black Hat SEO :
• Unrelated
Keywords : This is something we can notice in some of the sites, who try to
add extra keywords, which do not have any link to the content present in the
website, which is a strategy used in the Black Hat Technique, to gain more visitors
on the website, but this technique won’t last on the long run, if by any chance
the search engine gets to know about Black Hat Techniques being used to get
visitors, then your website is likely to get banned.
• Keyword
Stuffing: Use of keywords is likely
to increase the ranking of your website on the search engine results but when
any website starts using lots of keyword, more than necessary then it is called
as keyword stuffing which can lead to drastic results. Just adding the keyword
in order to get good search engine results, when in reality the content does
not make any sense, will affect adversely, when a user leaves the web page due
to lack of information on the page. Keyword stuffing is one of the strategies
used in the Black Hat techniques and which might help to gain greater traffic
for a particular period of time but will affect the website in the longer run.
• Hidden
Texts/Links : Links are another way to drive traffic to your website, which
does wonder’s as it takes your audience's interest further in taking them to
several pages in your website which is good for gaining potential customers,
but some websites make use of Black Hat Technique to hide text or link so that
the user unknowingly clicks it and gets redirected to the other page. This
strategy is called as Hidden Text/Link and it is done by making the link color
same to the website background so that the user cannot differentiate between
them. It is one of the tactics used in the Black Hat Techniques.
• Cloaking:
There are some websites, which fool search engine by providing some other
information and when a user enters the website, they are presented with other
content and after clicking on the page it would divert user to some other page,
this is what is called as cloaking. It is tactic used by many websites, to gain
more visitors, by putting some other content for search engine and some other
content inside the website, but if a search engine comes to know about this
fact, the website will be banned immediately and strict penalty actions will be
taken against that website. Cloaking is one of the serious offenses to any
business.
• Doorway
pages or Gateway pages: Similar to the concept of Cloaking, doorway pages
are web pages which tend to contain unrelated keywords and when clicked on
them, they take a user to some other page. The whole and sole purpose of using
this tactic are to gain a large number of visitors to the website in less time
and then redirect them to some other page in order to get a visitor.
• Page
Swapping : Page swapping is one of the tactics used in Black Hat Techniques
to gain more user’s in a short period of time to maintain the financial sheet
balance, which again is not good for the long run, because it is a tactic which
is used to create a website which attracts many visitors to the website, but as
soon as it gets visitors, the complete website content is changed. This is what
is referred to as Page Swapping, which is not suitable for a long run and if
search engine gets to know that the website is using Black Hat Techniques, the
website will face lots of penalties.
• Duplicate
Content : Some of the websites on the internet make use of the vast
information available in the market to profit themselves, that is instead of
taking an idea from the vast content market present in the internet, they
simply copy the content from some other website, which is also one of the
tactics of Black Hat SEO Techniques, but it results in really bad output as the
content is copied and without the consent of the website, heavy penalties are
charged and the website has to pay or all that.
• Spam
Blogs: The whole and sole purpose of these spam blogs are to add keywords
to the website in order to get good rankings, but they actually lack in
information and related content. Another important aspect is to write phrases
in the form which forces users to click on the ad, present in the place
• Spam
Blog Comments : I strongly believe that comments are good to attract visitors to the website, but
only when it is done organically and the content is good enough to attract the
visitors towards it, but it instead of comments, some people purposely attach
links to the comments, then it is termed as Black Hat SEO Technique. Which is
basically a spam technique and which never works in the long run, it is better
to post comments related to the topic of the content despite just posting a
vague comment in order to add a link to that post. This is one of the dangerous
tactics, which is detected by the search engine, which is charged with a heavy
penalty.
Black Hat SEO techniques are not fair and use illegal ways
to gain visitors to the website, which is both unnecessary as well as would
fail to last in the long run. There are many more tactics which are not
mentioned in the above list but they are similarly dangerous. If the search
engine detects them, then along with heavy penalties, the website might be
banned immediately and which would for sure affect the reputation of the
business, which is why it is advised to stay away from these Black Hat SEO Techniques,
and try using organic ways to attract visitors an be able to convert them to
potential customers. Organic ways would involve, proper use of keyword, unique
and specified-informative content and just as many links which are actually
required in the website, not more not less.
Sometimes we commit mistakes unknowingly and we don’t realise it, and we risk the online
presence of our business, which is very important to any business and in this
rapidly growing technological era where marketing tactics are plenty and it is
an easy way to market and present people with your services, it is sometimes
hard to distinguish between what is good and what is bad for the business, we
can sometimes fail to distinguish between the Black Hat Techniques and the
White Hat techniques, and unknowingly commit mistakes.
And this being said, we are now left with the last question
that is, “How to protect your business
from Black Hat Techniques ?” so
let's start and discuss the aspects of how to protect your business from Black
Hat SEO Techniques :
1.
Avoid
Unrelated Keywords: For any website, keywords help in the ranking of the
website and if u start using unrelated keywords only for the purpose of getting
more visitors, then ultimately it wont last in the long run and if search engine
detects it, you might have to go through penalty as well as your website will
be banned permanently. That is the reason you must avoid unrelated keywords.
2.
Duplicate
Content: Duplicate content not only hamper’s your website’s reputation but it also affects the reader’s. If the
content is duplicate, it won’t grab attention and you might get into legal
terms, for copying the content without permission. Thus this is what you should
avoid the most.
3.
Keyword
Stuffing: Excess of anything is dangerous, similarly inserting too many
keywords in the content just to get more visitors, is something which does not
help. Inserting too many keywords would result in adverse effects to the
website such as penalty by Google. Search engines use algorithms for the ranking
of websites and stuffing of keywords won’t help because Google doesn’t rank
based on that specifically, there are several factors which affect the ranking
of the website in google search. Rather it will only reduce the reputation of
the website.
4.
Spam Blog
Comments : Spam comments can be done sometimes by mistake, but it should be
noted that comments do matter a lot in any website that is the reason why the
comments should be valid, because visitors do depend on the comments for
forming any view regarding any business, that is the reason why you should
never try to follow the Black Hat Techniques for Blog comments and before
posting any comment on the website, it must be checked several times before
posting.
So now, having learnt in detail about Black Hat Techniques
and ways to protect from them, this article thus comes to an end, above we have
tried and listed all the important aspects and points related to Black Hat
Techniques, although this article does not contain all the techniques, the
information provided above will surely help the readers to understand the topic
well. And as stated above, Black Hat Techniques might give results instantly,
but are not fit for the longer run, which is why you must try to use organic
ways to increase the website ranking as well gaining the number of visitors to
the website, it might take some time but will produce greater results in the
longer run.
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Website: www.sanbrains.com
