Don’t let the ‘Black Hats’ fool you: get the right kind of SEO for business
Modern business is all about visibility, high online rankings and search engine optimization (SEO) for business.
But did you know, there is a right way and a wrong way of doing SEO as well, known in the tech world as Black hat ?
What’s worse, is that this way is mostly illegal and can damage your business more than it can help it.
Why do people do Black Hat SEO?
Bogus or unqualified Search engine marketers use these risky techniques claiming to help improve search visibility in a faster and cheaper way, by basically breaking the search engine rules. But in the long run, it can hurt your search engine optimization and ranking much more than it can help. The results can be quite destructive to your site.
These unethical tactics can lead to being wiped out completely from search engines or gaining lower ranking.It also involves providing inaccurate information in structured data to fool the search engines themselves and users.
Examples of Black Hat techniques:
- Hidden Content: While hidden content may come in many forms, it essentially involves stuffing the actual code of the site with keywords that are not visible to the user. There are tools that can scour your code for this junk, which, if detected by Google could permanently ban your site from search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Keyword Stuffing:There are two certain short descriptions, called Meta tags, that are generally used to give search engines a summary about page content. If used incorrectly, they can alert a search engine that a site is using spam techniques to improve its ranking. For example using the same keyword word multiple times in a sentence. Take a look at this example;
- Doorway or Gateway Pages: Doorway aka gateway pages are pages designed for search engines and not humans. They are actually just fake pages that are stuffed usually with copied content and laden with one or two keywords that link to a target or landing page. The end user never sees these pages because they are automatically redirected to the target page. Almost like a trap door meant to fool search bots into believing that a website has content it actually does not.
- Link Farming: Link farming involves building a network of sites designed to link to each other to build link popularity. A few years ago this technique used to be an easy way to boost rankings. But nowadays the only purpose of link farms or free-for-all (FFA) pages is to list links of unrelated websites.
- Spam Comments: These are actually more annoying than anything else. Think back to the articles and posts you have read online, at some point you may have probably noticed unrelated and random comments and messages under these. It is a form of spamdexing with the primary purpose of getting visitors to click the link.
How can Black Hat SEO affect your business?
The truth is while you may seem to initially rank and top the search “charts”, Black Hatters know that it’s only a matter if time until their shady technics are discovered so most will offer you quick fix’s and make sure you pay up before search engines catch on.
Eventually though, any of the following will happen;
- Your website can actually get penalties for doing it
Search engines give penalties for doing black hat techniques as it goes against search engine terms of service. Getting a penalty to your website will reduce the ranking of your website within the search engine. Imagine all the work you have done on your website, and you are already ranking somewhere then you get a penalty that sets you back and lose revenue. It would not be nice.
2. Eventually your website can get permanently banned
Do you know that your website can be removed from the search results completely and blacklisted from all major search engines? Yes, that’s how risky black hat SEO is. Search engines can ban it from appearing on their search results page.
Take Keyword stuffing for instance – adding hundreds of keywords to a text on the website in order for the search engine to rank you on that specific keyword. This black hat technique is commonly used; however, top search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo have come up with ways to pick it up. And you will be busted!
3. Poor quality content for your audience.
A common negative practice is churning out poor quality content that is of no value to the searcher. This includes adding invisible keywords to your content or duplication of content from another website.
When a user clicks on the result thinking it’s going to be about the topic they searched for, they don’t find any of the content they were looking for.
How frustrating is that to a visitor? What do you think are the chances that guy will return to your website?
Creating quality content builds trust with your audience and also sets your website apart from the rest. Resulting in high traffic from visitors.
There are many of disadvantages that arise from using these wrong tactics, some can be fixed and others not, so it is advisable you do not put yourself in a position of having to fix anything in the first place.
With the advancement of technology, search engine marketing is the greatest method of doing businesses, you find everything you are looking searching by just a click.
In future articles, we will talk more about what actually constitutes the RIGHT kind of optimisation. For now, if you’re looking to get seen online, you need to trust professionals who know the right way to grab attention..
CreativeMagic Group digital marketers have been in the business for over 14 years and know that, with careful planning and strategy, SEO for business can be used to have lasting and long term measurable results that ensure you get a return on investment.
It’s never too late to improve your website with effective technical optimisation. T
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