8 Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid

1. Paid Links

The vast majority of the time, things are crystal clear: people are paying money explicitly for links based on PageRank, flowing PageRank, and attempting to climb the rankings.

Purchasing links for SEO has evident benefits for the buyer. First and foremost, it is simple. There is no need to be concerned about the quality of the content once the transaction has been completed. Second, the anchor text, which is a major Google ranking element, is picked based on the customer’s preferences. Because these two factors are sufficient to effectively manipulate search engine rankings, this SEO strategy is categorized as a significant black hat.

2. Spam Comments

Have you ever had a newly published remark on your website turn out to be… spammers with its meaningless content and irrelevant promotional link?

These are the actions we are referring to.

Spam comments are meant to generate free backlinks. Links obtained in this manner are 100% ‘no follow and transfer no SEO juice, making this strategy a complete waste of effort.

Nonetheless, it is now one of the most common black hat tactics. Furthermore, it is not necessarily done manually; there are even technologies available to mechanically disperse spam comments across the Internet.

If you leave your blog up for comments without anybody to moderate them, you will eventually get spam remarks, which will leave a terrible impression on your users and reduce the quality of their user experience. As a result, it is preferable to prevent spam comments before they cause your readers discomfort and deter them from making valuable comments.

Keep in mind that spam comments can affect your site by making it appear neglected and unprofessional. This is why, after filtering out spam with blocking plugins, you should wait and approve the comments.

3. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content, as the name implies, refers to the well-known “copy and paste” content generation activity across domains and indicates that blocks of copied text from diverse sources perfectly match or look quite similar. Because search engines appreciate unique information, content that is purposefully replicated across numerous domains is regarded as one of the worst black hats practices. When the same results appear in the Google listing, it is a clear indication of search engine ranking manipulation, which usually results in a poor user experience.

Duplicate content affects both distinct domains and the same domain. The second scenario, on the other hand, is less serious because it usually indicates a lack of information or neglect. As a result, it is critical to use a canonical tag to identify the original version of your content. This makes other copies invisible to Google bots.

4. Article Spinning

Article spinning is a practice that is becoming increasingly popular in response to the duplicate content problem (see above). This is the next level of plagiarism, and it entails the use of special software that takes the copied material and rewrites it as a “new,” “original” post. Modification effectively reduces the probability of getting caught by any plagiarism detection program.

5. Cloaking

What happens if you type the term “cloaking” into Google’s search bar? You will be sent to a Google Knowledge result that first defines “cloaking” as a search engine technique that displays completely different content or URL to the user than to the search engine spider.

In fact, this SEO technique is regarded as dishonest because it deceives search engines in order to achieve the desired rankings for target keywords. Furthermore, it is a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines because, in most circumstances, it returns irrelevant results to users.

The most typical cloaking examples are provided by Search Console Help:

Serving an HTML text page to search engines while displaying an image or Flash page to users.

Inserting text or keywords into a page only if the user-agent requesting the page is a search engine rather than a human visitor.

When Google detects negative ranking criteria such as JavaScript-Hidden Content, Empty Link Anchors, or Meta/JavaScript Redirects, it may result in cloaking penalties, which can ruin your website’s long-term performance.

6. Doorway Pages

In other words, gateway pages, jump pages, or bridge pages are specifically optimized for specific keywords and meant to score well for specific queries. These landing pages serve no purpose other than to deceive search engines and redirect visitors from a specific result to another, unrelated destination.

7. Keyword Stuffing

This well-known black hat SEO approach is no longer as effective as it once was.

Search engines are becoming too clever to be fooled by this simple approach.

Keyword stuffing is the practice of employing the same keywords repeatedly on a single page in order to increase its visibility and organic traffic. Keyword-stuffed content does not appear natural, and as a result, it is not user-friendly.

Try it right now!

Learn 5 Techniques for Creating Findable Content Without Keyword Stuffing.

8. Invisible Text

To put it simply, the invisible text is the use of white text, such as a list of keywords, on a white background.

This strategy renders keywords completely invisible to visitors while still allowing search engines to identify and index them.

Consequences

Black hat techniques are extremely dangerous to use because they are usually discovered sooner or later.

As a result, a website may be prohibited or fined. Being blacklisted is uncommon because it means that a specific website will be permanently removed from the SERPs. Penalization is a considerably more prevalent penalty for negative SEO, and it entails decreasing a website’s rank.