Avoiding Black Hat SEO Tactics (Part I)

Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to a category of tactics that attempt to trick the search engines into high natural rankings.

Some of these tactics will work. However, they are all short term as the search engines will eventually figure out what is happening and quickly remove all your pages from the search engine index. Once your pages are removed from the index, your completely invisible to the world.

The purpose of this article is to educate you on some of these tactics so that you can avoid them yourself. With all the information that is available in cyberspace, you might come across one or more of these techniques and assume they are ok to use. They are unethical and could easily get you banned from one or more of the major search engines. It's definitely not worth the possible short-term gain in traffic.

While not an exhaustive list, let's take a look at some of the more popular Black Hat SEO techniques.

Black Hat SEO Tactic #1: Keyword Stuffing

Each of your pages should be based on a specific high-demand keyword and using this keyword repeatedly in your body text helps the search engines rank the page for that keyword.

A good keyword density for your body copy is 3-5%. However, there is a black hat SEO technique called Keyword Stuffing that uses the keyword phrase much more than the typical 3-5% density. In the past, this technique worked, but now the search engines are smarter and will realize when a page is stuffed with a particular keyword. Stick with 3-5% keyword density and this is an issue you will never have to worry about.

As an example, the main keyword phrase for this page is "Black Hat SEO." You'll find this keyword sprinkled throughout the page at about the right density. The most important part is that it reads normally. With keyword stuffing, the resultant copy is awkward and doesn't read normally, like mentioned by https://grademiners.co.

Black Hat SEO Tactic #2: Hidden Text

Keyword stuffing always led to issues with readability since the same keyword phrase was popping up with unnatural regularity. Because of this, some people continued the practice of stuffing keywords but made the text color the same as the background color and placed these keywords in areas of the page that didn't interfere with the body text. This made the text invisible to readers but still visible to the search engines. Now, search engines are wise to keyword density no matter what the font color. Steer clear from this tactic.

Black Hat SEO Tactic #3: URL Redirects

A redirect happens when a you click on a search engine result but you actually get served a different page. Some people will use black hat techniques to make a page rank high in the engines and then send visitors to a completely different page using a piece of redirect code. This new page usually has nothing to do with the visitor's initial search query and typically sends them to a high-pressure sales page.

Black Hat SEO Tactic #4: Link Farms

A Link farm is a community of websites that exist only to provide links to other sites. Because Google and the other search engines use inbound links as one measurement of website popularity, many link farms were established to allow webmasters to place links pointing back to their sites, thereby increasing their search engine rankings.

While this worked initially, most search engines now look at the "authority" of the site that is providing the link. If your site has many links from "low authority" sites (such as link farms), you'll find these inbound links are given very little weight in increasing your search ranking. In fact, these poor quality inbound links can actually hurt your rankings. The bottom line? Stay away from link farms.

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