Black Hat SEO Sneaky Tactics
It might seem tempting, but don’t allow your site to be a victim of sneaky Black Hat SEO tactics. While they might appear to give sites a short term boost, they’ll always fail in the long run as the search engines figure out the scheme. Here are 6 black hat techniques to avoid at all costs:
1.Pages Over-Stuffed With Keywords
When a reader can easily tell that a certain keyword or phrase dominates a web page’s content. Then chances are good that page contains a few too many instances of the keyword phrase. There’s a fine line between optimizing a page for a certain keyword phrase and taking it too far. Going too far can indeed be considered Black Hat SEO. But it also creates a really poor visitor experience at the same time. A perfect example of how word stuffing is done would be:
“keyword stuffing, stuffing keywords, why stuff keywords, content keyword stuffing, etc. with no point to the actual use of the repeated phrases and phrase variations“.
Don’t do it. In the “Old Days” of search engines, keyword density was a method used by SEO’s to put a mathematical number on the weight associated with a target search term as it related to the overall documents word count. This is how keyword stuffing was born. With today’s much more sophisticated algorithms, relevance is so much more than just how many times a particular word appears within your web page. If you see someone using this technique, you know that; a) they have no clue and b) they are definitely implementing a Black Hat SEO technique, though way outdated.
2.Hiding Hidden Text
This sneaky Black Hat SEO tactic has been in use since the early days of search engines, but it’s amazing that people are still trying to pull it off. Using hidden text on a page that’s catered just towards being bait for the search engine, rather than being intended for the reader, is frankly, just pathetic and can lead to a site being both penalized or worse, banned.
3.Deploying Doorway Pages for Black Hat SEO
A doorway page is basically a page contained on another website. That is created just to lure in a visitor from the search engine and “pass them through” to the target site, Sounds okay initially. But the problem is that many of the search spammers that use doorway pages are known to target topics completely irrelevant to the rest of the site. It’s just not okay to promise one thing and then give another thing altogether.
4.Farming For Links Important For Black Hat SEO
Incoming links from relevant, quality websites are a great way to build traffic and improve search engine popularity. But receiving links from a site or directory that is a known “link farm”. Or basically a site that offers no real value except by sending outgoing links to any random variety of sites, is a really bad idea. Steer clear of link farms. They don’t help you and if you link to them, the damage can be huge.
5.Cloaking Pages
Cloaking is a huge, and nearly immediately obvious, turn off to the search engines. The practice of cloaking means that for any given page. You serve up one thing for human visitors and another version altogether for the search engines. While there are very legitimate reasons to use cloaking, for almost all sites. It typically means you have something to hide.
6. Spammy Comments
Trying to build link popularity by randomly posting comments featuring links pointed towards your site. Within any range of blogs, guestbooks, or the like, is a bad idea. It’s still okay to participate in the conversation, and even to include your link. But only when actually engaging in a meaningful and purposeful way not just to blindly point a bunch of links at your site. Most blogs disable the feature that allows these outgoing links to carry any weight anyway.
