6 SEO tactics To Avoid That Will Get You In Trouble
Google is much smarter than you think, especially if you try to game the system through blackhat SEO tactics. These strategies are not a part of Google’s guidelines to rank your website. Instead, these tricks are a backway for ranking your website higher on Google. Although blackhat SEO tactics can get you in trouble, many small businesses practice them without evaluating the risks associated with them. In the end, such businesses end up losing their website or get banned from Google.
Using blackhat SEO is not advised by any digital marketing expert, nor will I endorse it. These SEO strategies can decrease your existing ranking. Therefore, trying blackhat SEO after ranking higher on Google is also not a good idea. If you want to increase your website visibility, stick to Google’s guidelines and learn from the below-mentioned SEO tactics to avoid.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of increasing visibility in search engines for a website and its content. SEO can include black hat, white hat, or grey hat techniques to get higher rankings on Google. Almost all businesses strive to rank higher on Google because it has a 92.06% share of search traffic. This giant search engine shares information and guides about ranking on its result page, and you can leverage them.
Why Do You Need SEO?
You will want your site listed high on Google for customer inquiries as it increases leads resulting in potential sales. When done correctly with organic methods like link building which occurs naturally over time (unlike blackhat), this strategy helps bring visitors back to your page repeatedly without any additional work! Some studies have shown that nearly 88.8% of people who start an online purchase don’t complete it after leaving their first site because they got distracted by other offers they found while browsing.
Types of SEO
SEO is the most important aspect of digital marketing and undoubtedly the most effective digital marketing tactic to invest your time into. There are various ways you can take advantage of SEO tactics to boost your ranking on Google. Here are a few to mention.
1. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website for Google and other search engines. The technique involves fixing broken links, optimizing metadata, and other keyword-related functions that improve your website. Another important aspect of On-page SEO is making your website faster. You can use lazy loading and other features to improve your website’s load time. According to Hobo-web, the ideal load time of a website is between 1 and 2 seconds. Anything more than the mentioned time will frustrate your customers, and you would love potential business.
2. Off-Page SEO
Off-page is pretty much everything that happens outside your website. It’s the process of building trust in your website and convincing Google that your website is relevant in its niche. You can do this by scoring backlinks from high DA websites. There are several link-building strategies, but the best among all strategies is Guest Posting. Guest Posting is the process of publishing your articles on other blogs. These posts are usually written by you and for a different blog’s audience, but they include links back to your website so Google can index them as well.
The importance of guest blogging cannot be overstated. One study found that “Guest Blogging” accounts for 75% of all influencer link building efforts”. It would be best also to remember that not everything you do off-page will help build trust with search engines. So your website should have an excellent On-page SEO team as well.
3. Technical SEO
Technical SEO covers both on-page and off-page SEO and involves all activities that improve customer experience. From website speed to site map, everything is a part of technical SEO. The responsibilities of a technical SEO team are to make the website mobile-friendly, use hypertext, consistent URL structure, and internal links.
What Is Blackhat SEO? The SEO Tricks That Could Hurt Your Business
Blackhat SEO is a term used to describe any black market tactics that can lead to penalties and even a ban from Google. That means you are doing something wrong, but it’s not quite clear what it is yet. Black hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, incentivizing links through methods such as paying for backlinks or using hidden text on the page to manipulate search engine rankings.
For example, You might want your website under “SEO,” so you start spamming keywords onto pages where they don’t belong because they’re related; this would be blackhat SEO. Another example of blackhat SEO can be doorway pages.
Many digital marketers use doorway pages or sneaky redirects (a type of blackhat SEO) to manipulate rankings through paid ads like Adwords Campaigns or Bing Ads campaigns. These strategies could get you in trouble and possibly cause your business to collapse.
What Is White Hat SEO?
White Hat SEO is the opposite of black hat, and these tactics don’t violate any spamming restrictions set by search engines. Instead, Google and other search engines back these strategies. The idea behind banning blackhat SEO is that it ranks irrelevant websites against keywords. For instance, if a website is keyword stuffing and using all the keywords it can find, it would show up on every search and ruin the search engine user experience. Therefore, Google and other search engines have shared acceptable SEO practices and don’t mess up user experience.
What is Grey Hat SEO?
Grey hat SEO is the middle ground between white and black hat SEO. These strategies have their risks but won’t result in an immediate ban. Grey hat SEO techniques involve:
- Cloaking
- Purchasing old domains
- Duplicate Content
- Link Buying
- Social media automation and purchasing followers
These strategies are ill-defined by Google and used by a professional SEO expert to significantly improve your ranking on Google. However, it’s like playing with fire, and you could end up hurting your business.
Black Hat SEO Tactics to Avoid
Search engines like Google are always trying new ways to detect black hatters from violating its guidelines, but at the moment, cloaking is still one of the best blackhat strategies for getting big results quickly before being detected by Search Engines or, worse: banned outright.
Many people resort to blackhat SEO when their current marketing efforts haven’t delivered the expected results. Here are a few blackhat strategies to avoid:
1. Plagiarism
Google is against the idea of plagiarism. Its guidelines are complex, and even the slightest hint of plagiarism could result in your blog being de-ranked or removed from search engine results. Google and other search engines prefer originality over duplication. This is because stealing someone else’s ideas or words is not ethical. However, paraphrasing is acceptable, but you will need comprehensive knowledge of the content you are writing. Google has introduced NLP keywords (short for natural Language Processing). NLP keywords are industry jargon. For example: if you are writing content for the automobile industry, and you are an expert on the matter, you will include words like “torque, transmission, clutch, and gear” Google looks for these terms and ranks content accordingly. The idea behind this is that these terms reflect your expertise over the content.
2. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing was once a good strategy. However, as Google’s algorithm developed, it’s been considered as a blackhat practice. It only works if you want to get blacklisted! Keyword stuffing or overstuffing pages with keywords to manipulate search engine rankings by fooling software algorithms that rank web pages based on the number of times they appear in text content found on those websites. Google has been tweaking its algorithm for years to combat this tactic, but it’s still out there nonetheless. The best way to avoid keyword stuffing is to place them naturally.
3. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content complicates Google’s work and makes it harder for search engines to rank relevant websites in response to a keyword search. Duplication is slightly different from plagiarism. It involves posting your content on multiple websites to garner more attention and increase your website’s visibility (through guest posts). Google wants new content on every website so that its users have the latest information at their disposal. Duplicating content might rank your website for a while, but it’s not with the risk of getting caught.
4. Unnatural Link-Building
Backlinks play a crucial role in ranking your website higher on search engines. Moreover, scoring backlinks from one high DA website is far better than 100 backlinks from low DA websites. Google has also made it clear that receiving backlinks from the same niche is preferred over scattered backlink strategies. As a result, unnatural backlinks have become a part of black hat SEO.
Unnatural link-building tactics include buying links or blog comment spamming. This link-building tactic can affect your rankings by having pages with high amounts of unnatural backlinks get deindexed from Google, causing an SEO penalty. You’ll also be penalized if you don’t take steps to disavow and remove these types of blackhat methods. So, it’s best you stay away from them altogether!
5. Article Spinning
Article spinning is a blackhat SEO technique that can mess up your online reputation. This tactic involves taking an article and rewriting it by using synonyms of the words to make it seem like you have more content on your site than you actually do. Not only does this create low-quality, useless content, but it also takes away from time resources for creating fresh new articles or blog posts. You should avoid these blackhat tactics at all costs as they may get your website banned from Google search results, causing serious issues with website traffic and rankings.
6. Doorway Pages
A doorway page is intended to mislead search engines into ranking a particular website higher against particular keywords. In simple words, a doorway page is a hidden page in a website with keyword stuffing. This page is not visible to the web visitor; instead, it’s indexed on search engines. When a web user searches for a keyword listed on the doorway page, search engines show multiple results, including the “doorway page.” Upon clicking on the click, the user is redirected to the actual page with relevant content. Though it might seem ethical to some people, search engines have strict penalties for this act because it misleads users. Moreover, it creates problems for relevant websites practicing the correct ways of ranking on SERPs.
For example: if someone searches for the “buy pizza online,” and a website has a doorway page for this keyword, search engines would rank that particular page higher due to keyword density. Although the purpose of the search is complete, the web user is misled into clicking on a website that practices unethical ways of stealing ranking from a genuine webpage. Hence, doorway pages are considered a blackhat SEO tactic by Google, and using them can get your business in trouble.
In a Nutshell
Excessive use of blackhat SEO tactics is a bad idea because it can lead to a ban from Google. If this happens, other marketing efforts will go to waste. The site will have no visibility in search engine rankings, and traffic might suffer significantly, which you could have avoided if you had not used blackhat SEO techniques such as doorway pages or keyword stuffing. You should avoid these types of blackhat tactics at all costs.
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