Cunning, Illegal Black-Hat SEO Techniques That You Should Avoid Doing This Year

How do websites improve their rankings on the search engines, and gain more followers or visitors in the process? Well, they ask for help from the SEO Brisbane experts! For starters, SEO stands for search engine optimization, which in simple terms means the process of improving a website to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to it in Bing, Google and other search engines. However, what’s surprising is that there are actually two ways to do SEO, and it’s the good and the bad way.  Now, let’s take a look at the bad, or “black-hat” SEO techniques that you avoid doing this year.

Just How Sleazy is Black-Hat SEO?

Just how sleazy, and cunning, is black-hat SEO? Well according to our seasoned SEO Brisbane 

experts, black-hat SEO can actually be a quick way to boost a website’s rankings and increase its search engine exposure, although these tactics can actually do more harm than good for your search engine optimization efforts!

To learn more about black-hat SEO, let’s refer to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Which provides the ground rules for ethical search engine optimization. The guideline says that if you use tactics or shortcuts for SEO ranking which violate Google’s rules and regulations,  then you’re engaging in black-hat SEO, which any law-abiding or professional marketer or website owner can stop at all costs.

And, if Google finds out that this or that website is using black-hat SEO strategies, they will penalize it. And, receiving a punishment from Google will cause the search engine to change its PageRank algorithm, which eventually lowers the website’s rating score, or completely delists it!

Keyword Stuffing

Now, here’s one good example of black-hat SEO that you should never be doing today, and tomorrow, and it’s keyword stuffing! This black-hat SEO technique refers to the process of stuffing a web page with keywords or numbers in the hopes of fooling a search engine into believing that it’s important to the search. Usually, these keywords are unrelated to the website’s content.

Occasionally, these keywords are often shielded from the user, but they’re still searched by the search engine. Stuffing keywords eventually leads to the degradation of the user interface and potentially damages the website’s rankings.

A perfect example of keyword stuffing is when writing to rank for the “best flat-screen TV” using the following words: “If you’re looking for the best flat-screen TV, look no further for the best flat-screen TV. We have the best flat-screen TV. The best flat-screen TV runs smoothly…..and more”.

Comment Spamming

If you think that spamming is only dome on emails, think again, because comment spamming is fact becoming a notorious black-hat SEO method! Well, the good thing is that while it’s becoming less common today, there was actually a time when the comment sections were flooded with automated comments which were written to create backlinks.

The good thing is that Google’s algorithm has now been modified to effectively weed out and discredit links that were created by spam or by bots.

Misleading Redirects

Whether you are fully preparing for a site migration, or you’re just updating an older page to a new URL, using redirects is part and parcel of SEO Brisbane . While there’s actually nothing with redirects, because this makes sure that the website well-organized and easily accessible by users and the search engine crawlers.

However, sneaky and misleading redirects are done to deceive the search engines, and display content that is very different from what a user sees. In most cases, a search engine will index the original page, while the user is taken back to a different destination URL. 

Paid & Manipulative Links

There are a lot of sleazy black hat SEO schemes that are related to links, and this is the area where a lot of confusion originates. As links are earned instead of being bought or paid,  considering that these are literal votes of trust or confidence, the SEO Brisbane experts stress that you should tactics like paid or “sponsored” links that do not contain a  rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attribute.

You should also avoid excessive link exchanges, blog comment spamming, forum spamming, large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns, automated link building, spammy bookmarking sites, directories and web 2.0 properties, site-wide footer or sidebar links, and links which use exact match or commercial anchor text. 

Hidden Text

Hidden text is actually text that’s of the same color as the background that’s positioned off the screen or behind the image. This is considered by ethical SEO Brisbane  adherents to be deceptive, because there’s a clear attempt to hide text completely, which is literally cramming in too many keywords. 

Doorway Pages

In simple terms, doorway pages, jump pages or bridge pages are specially optimized with lots of targeted keywords, and are designed to rank high for certain queries. However, these landing pages have actually little or no value, and are simply used for tricking the search engines and transfer a visitor from a chosen result to another, unrelated destination!

Duplicate Content

As the name implies, duplicate content refers to the well-known practices of “copy and paste” content creation techniques that are practiced across domains, and means that blocks of copied content from different sources exactly match each other and look very much alike.

Article Spinning

Article spinning is actually kind of similar to duplicate content, as this is a next-level form  of plagiarism, and often involves using special software that takes the copied source and rephrases it for later use as a “new” and ”unique” post. Modification of the article efficiently reduces  the risk of being detected by any plagiarism tool.

Cloaking

Cloaking refers to the sleazy practice of displaying crawlers content which differs from what you present to your users. On cloaking technique is to use a variety of names, slogans and definitions that are diametrically opposed to what the actual content is all about. If the search engines detect some level of cloaking, then the  website will be blocked!