Getting organic traffic on the website is the aim of every website owner. PPC or other online advertising can bring quality traffic, but they are very costly. Therefore, most of the website owners go for SEO practice. SEO is the set of techniques and methods used to rank a website higher in the search engine result pages, ultimately bringing more traffic to the website.
Where every digital marketer makes efforts to get a higher rank, some practices black hat SEO to quickly rank their website higher on SERPs. Black hat SEO encompasses services and activities that, firms, contractors, or marketers employ to improve SEO by avoiding Google’s advice. They expose and make use of the search engine vulnerabilities.
Black hat SEO practices are against the terms of the search engine, and therefore, search engine results would prohibit your website. Marketers or firms may see short term results with the help of black hat SEO, but the website would be banned permanently by the search engines.
Many SEO techniques come under black hat practice. Here are a few of those techniques that you should avoid to build long-term search traffic:
Low-Quality Content
Since content is one of the main factors that determine the ranking of the search engine, uploading content regularly on the website is essential. Moreover, Google awards those websites with a higher rank.
Almost every marketer is familiar with this fact, and some try to work over smartly and either copy the content of another website or upload shallow quality content with the intent to make Google fool. However, the Google algorithm is smart enough to analyze the content of a website. Therefore, if the content on a website is found of low quality or plagiarized, Google punishes the website either by ranking that site too low or by prohibiting it permanently.
Therefore, make sure to upload high-quality content without copying from any other source, and also that it is educating, engaging, or entertaining to the audience.
Low-Quality Backlinks
Backlinking is a significant component that affects the rank of your website on search engine result pages. Having high-quality backlinks on websites in your industry with high traffic will result in much higher traffic for your website. However, having an unusual amount of backlinks on sites with zero authority will hurt your rankings. Meaning, if you link your website’s URL to non-viewed, out-of-country, low authority insect enthusiast websites, your SEO is going to take a hit.
When executing a link-building campaign, get a link from the websites in your industry having high domain & page authority, and traffic! This will help your website to obtain a higher rank on the search engine result pages.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is another black hat SEO technique that when employed, can hurt your business in the long run. Keywords are words included within the HTML code of your website that gives signals to Google. Mostly, keywords are used in headers, meta-descriptions, page titles, URLs, and alternative text for images. When appropriately employed, a keyword strategy can boost your organic traffic.
However, keyword stuffing is a technique where several keywords are included at much too high a density. Think of these two meta-descriptions as an example:
Good Meta-description for a hospital system’s about us page:
“Hospital Conglomerate United is one of America’s largest healthcare providers, with hundreds of hospitals located in the Southeast.”
Bad Meta-description for the same hospital system’s About Us page with keyword-stuffed:
“Hospital Conglomerate United is a system of hospitals that focus on being the best hospitals for patients seeking hospitals.”
This is, undoubtedly, an oversimplified version of keyword stuffing. However, there are limitless examples of keyword stuffing in the real world. Although you can rank your website for the particular keywords using this technique, the overall performance of your website’s SEO will go down. Moreover, these kinds of descriptions leave a bad impression on the visitors.
Comment Spamming
Many websites leave their comments section open for the videos, blogs, and more to get comments from the general viewers or readers all across the web.
Comments typically have relevant, helpful, and attractive content. However, spam comments hurt your brand. Therefore, website owners should stay proactive and control the comment quality to prevent spam comments.
Stop accepting spam comments on your pages and blogs as well. Spam comments can destroy your search rankings as you will be providing access to the links that are entirely unrelated to your site with stuffed keywords.
Moreover, Google also penalizes the websites that have a massive amount of spam links from comments.
Wrap Up
Search engine optimization is a time-consuming procedure. Also, if you want real results, start from the fundamentals and don’t go for timesavers.
Moreover, if you want to get long term results from search engines, avoid the black hat SEO techniques. They will not just hurt your website but also ruin your website’s online readership and reliability.