It is not uncommon anymore for business owners to know the importance of having a website for the growth of their business. After all, it is such a waste if you sell good stuff but nobody can find it, right? For that reason, SEO exists. Many business owners hire SEO services, but so many of them are still not aware of the dark side of SEO if you use it the wrong way, like using black-hat SEO techniques for your website. Black-hat SEO techniques are the “quick” methods or the “short-cuts” used for increasing your website visibility in a way that is against search engine rules and guidelines. Basically, you might get fast results with these techniques, but in a negative way that if search engines find out about it (which they usually do), it will cause damage to your business, resulting in getting penalised for what you have done. Therefore, if you are a business owner and wanting to hire an SEO company, make sure you know these black-hat SEO techniques, so that you will avoid these techniques in the future. This article will tell you the risky black-hat SEO techniques that are actually still used even until today. Keep reading to find out!
Paid links
Buying links for SEO may be undeniably advantageous for the buyer, as it is easy. If you pay links for SEO, once a transaction is done, there is no need to bother with the quality of the content. Also, the anchor text, which is a strong Google ranking factor, is also chosen according to customer’s preferences. This method are able to effectively manipulate search engine rankings, and that’s why this SEO technique is classified as a serious black hat.
Spam comments
Spam has been people’s public enemy even since the dawn of time. Yes, it is undeniably but annoyingly true. You may often see spam comments in blogs which might bother the blog’s owner, especially if the comments are not relevant to the blog posts at all. While there are some ways you can do to make the comments more natural than just becoming spam messages, most of the comments we have seen are all spammy and irrelevant, making them really bad for SEO. If your blog also contains spams, make sure you set comment moderation for your blog so that you can filter comments before publishing the comment.
Duplicate content
Oh, yes, another content you might find on Google. Just like the name suggests, duplicate content means as the well-known “copy and paste” content creation practice across domains and means that blocks of copied content from different sources exactly match each other or look very much alike.
Search engines prefer unique and high quality content which is why content purposely duplicated across different domains is perceived as one of the worst black hat techniques. You might search for something on Google, but you accidentally find the same results in the Google listing. This can be a clear and obvious sign of manipulation of search engine rankings and it may usually result in poor user experience.
That’s the most common parts of black-hat SEO techniques that are surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) still used even until today. With this knowledge in mind, you can avoid doing black-hat SEO techniques. If you need more information about SEO, feel free to contact us and our team will be ready to assist you.