Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-BlackHat SEO

As a business owner, your online and digital strategy is a key asset in your marketing plan to promote your business.  If your online presence is to succeed against the multitude of competitors, SEO arguably the most important strategy to improve your visibility in search engines.

Of all the sources that draw online traffic to your site, search engines are still the number one source. 80 percent of all traffic to a site is considered organic through the search engines.

Like many business owners, you may be inundated with guaranteed offers from SEO companies to raise your search rankings. One of the key issues you need to consider is the techniques used to improve rankings especially Black Hat.

What is BlackHat?

Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices used to increase a site or page’s rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines’ terms of service. “black hat” originated in Western movies to separate the “bad guys” from the “good guys,” who wore white hats (see white hat SEO).

These practices are against the search engine’s terms of service and can result in the site being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites.

 How can you spot a BlackHat technique?

Black Hat SEO is most commonly defined as a disapproved practice that nevertheless could increase a page’s ranking in a search engine result page. A key test to assess whether a BlackHat technique is being deployed is to ask:

“Is the content I’m adding valued to the user or am I just doing this for search engines to see? If no value is added to the user, but rankings are likely to increase, then your decisions are highly likely to be black hat. The same test can be applied to paid search practices to determine whether an activity is considered black hat ppc.

Recognized Black Hat SEO Tactics

The following SEO tactics are considered black hat and should not be exercised at all if you want to stay above board with Google and other search engines:

• Content Automation
• Doorway Pages
• Hidden Text or Links
• Keyword Stuffing
• Reporting a Competitor (or Negative SEO)
• Sneaky Redirects
• Cloaking
• Link Schemes
• Guest Posting Networks
• Link Manipulation (including buying links)
• Article Spinning
• Link Farms, Link Wheels or Link Networks
• Rich Snippet Markup Spam
• Automated Queries to Google
• Creating pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content
• Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, trojans, and other malware

Why Should You Avoid Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO tactics can get your website banned from Google and other search engines.

Though there may be some short-term success and increased traffic to your site, Google penalties are getting more and more sophisticated and can have negative effects on your rankings and traffic. With hundreds of millions of users searching on Google per day, are you willing to risk being de-indexed?

Are Black Hat SEO Techniques For You?

If you trying to build a long-lasting business, you should avoid Black Hat SEO at all costs. Rather, you should look for alternative means of improving your search engine rankings.

In considering using an external partner to improve your ranking and manage your SEO, this should be the number one question and care should be taken to investigate how they will conduct their execution.