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What exactly happens when you engage in Black Hat SEO? What is Black Hat SEO in the first place? You are accused to be using Black Hat SEO techniques when your website reaches top rankings through dubious methods. These are methods that are used to overthrow the system by seeping through its loopholes and turning things in your favor. Manifestations of Black Hat SEO techniques are the rapid rising of your website from unknown to top 5. This kind of development cannot be made through natural means.
Black Hat SEO Techniques:
1. Keyword Stuffing – the age old technique that has now evolved in a different form. Back in the day webmasters use keyword stuffing to a ridiculous degree. Packing keywords and nothing else in your content page will get you penalized. Apparently Black Hats took the idea of keywords to the extreme. If search engines rank websites according to their correspondence with the search query keywords, then stuffing the page with keywords would boost them up. Wrong. Search engines will recognize this and with the prominence of SEO specialists online almost 24/7 it won't take long for your site to be reported. Some black hats still want to squeeze into the system through keyword stuffing so they hide the text. Putting white text on white background is still keyword stuffing. The fact that you're hiding it from plain sight just makes it worse.
2. Doorway Pages – these are pages fully optimized that would lead to your website. Aside from being a complete waste of time, it is also against Industry Standard to use doorway pages. Some shady SEO companies would insist you use Doorway pages and even force you into buying software. It is unnecessary. Your homepage is all that you need. If you were able to construct the website correctly and provide the necessary links for easier navigation, your off-page SEO activities would suffice.
3. Link Farms – another offshoot of the idea that the more backlinks you have, the more you develop website relevance and popularity. This would also inevitably make you rank higher in websites. Black hats took this to heart and created link farms that is supposedly give you thousands of backlinks. This is easily detected by search engines and the links would be discounted immediately.
Black Hat SEO can be a little tempting since just at the brink of its employment, you'd see results almost immediately Google updates its SERPs often, so a movement as big and as fast as that would be seen almost instantly. However as fast as the results come with Black Hat SEO that's also how fast it will go. You cannot fully rely on results brought upon by Black Hat SEO, you could not only be booted down from the rankings, you could also be booted out of Google's index itself and it's tough getting back once you're out.
There are more Black Hat SEO techniques uncovered in the public. Once black hat techniques gets out Google updates their system again and this results to more adjustment but one thing is for sure, Black Hat is here to stay. It's all a matter of choosing to do the right thing and regarding your business high enough to not put it in jeopardy.
As opposed to White Hat SEO, Black Hat is known to be the unethical process of optimization. It comprises activities that are not approved by search engines as the right way of optimizing sites. Such activities usually aim at fooling search engines as well as the users, who surf such sites for information.
Unfair and deceptive, these search engine optimization techniques are adapted by experts to improve their listings on SERPs. Despite being prohibited, Black Hat processes have actually boosted the rankings of numerous sites. Some of the commonly used techniques in this category are:
1) Cloaking – In this technique, an SEO presents different versions of the same web page to search engines and users. In this process, content is delivered on the basis of the IP address of the user requesting a particular page. Thus, the user is able to see a web page that contains content not otherwise visible on the page. This helps in deceiving search engines into displaying a page that does not actually deserve a listing.
2) Keyword Stuffing – This happens when the site's content is stuffed with keywords. Optimizers use colours that match the page's background, thus making the text invisible to human eye. However, search engines crawl such pages on the basis of their keyword density, thus giving them higher listings.
3) Duplicate Websites – In this Black Hat search engine optimization technique, ambiguous versions of the same site are floated on the World Wide Web. Thus, search engines enlist both these sites as individual listings on their rank pages, resulting in double revenue for the website owner.
4) Doorways and Redirects – Often, web pages are created only to attract search engines. Such pages do not have relevant content or design, and are just stuffed with keywords and Meta tags for crawling purposes. Users landing on such pages are then redirected to an original web page. This enhances the inflow of traffic on your site.
Search engine optimization companies indulging in such activities stand the risk of getting their sites blacklisted or banned by search engines. Hence, it is advisable to ward off from such techniques and stick to natural or paid processes of optimization.