Introduction to Black Hat SEO Techniques and the Reasons to Avoid It

Of course, you will question that whether we have white hat SEO techniques as well? The answer is a straight yes. But what do these words stand for? In this blog, we will learn everything about SEO, and obviously with a focus on our principal topic, which is the black hat SEO technique.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

If you are new to this word, then let me take a conventional approach. We all know that there are thousands of websites out there, or even more maybe. But not every website is the search engine’s first preference. Have you ever thought about how these websites are given priority or how are they being arranged? Let me use a better phrase, how are they being ranked? Well, a simple three-letter word can give you the answer, which is the search engine optimization.

The Process Involved

The major search engines like Google, Yahoo, bing, are getting upgraded constantly, why? We will get into it later but before that, we will have an insight into the process involved.

You have a website and will host it. But where is the visibility? Is your website getting any visits? Well, these are some of the basic questions that will surely come up in your mind. But even before that, you should be asking yourself whether your website is being accessible to SERPs.

Now now, SERPs are nothing but search engine result pages. Basically, SERP is the first page that comes up when you put a query into the search engine. SERPs can decide a good spot for your website if it has quality content, relevant keywords, and interlinks.

Introduction to Black Hat SEO Technique

Do you think it is easy to make the websites search-engine friendly? It is not an impossible task, but surely a time-consuming one. With digital landscape turning into a battle ground, obviously, people would think of ways that would give them an instant attention from search engines.

Basically, there are two types namely, Black and White SEO techniques, where the former goes against the webmaster guidelines while the latter does not.

Going along with the webmaster’s guideline is definitely a safe and healthy approach, but somewhere it is also time-consuming.

On the whole, to gain success in short time, people started practicing black hat SEO techniques, which was unethical, and in other words not acceptable.

Purpose of Google Webmaster Guidelines

Every rule has some purpose, and the purpose of Google webmaster’s guidelines is to give the best user-experience through relevant content and quality services. Violating these, websites gets penalized and in the process, they will lose their SEO ranks. Following are few black hat SEO techniques which are explained in brief.

• Keyword Stuffing-
  • An unethical SEO practice and one of the most used black hat SEO techniques. A visitor lands on your website in the hope of finding quality information but gets rewarded with irrelevant keywords. Surely, your website may gain a top post in the SERP, but not for a long time.
• Cloaking-
  • A shady technique, where, the content provided to a user and the search engine spider are completely different.
• Doorway Pages-
  • One the best examples that represent poor user-experience, where low-quality pages are created only to gain a favorable SEO spot. The customer expecting valuable information will only be moved in loops.

Why is it Bad?

Google demands quality, a good user-experience, and these practices obviously fail to provide that. Each one of these techniques not only compromised quality but also the purpose of search engines. Google tackled these issues systematically by pumping out a good number of algorithms.

Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird and Pigeon, every one of these Google algorithms played a major role in dealing with every back door SEO technique out there. Each year these algorithms are tweaked constantly making them more advanced and lethal for the black-hat practitioners.

Short term success is definite under black hat SEO techniques, but also the chances of getting penalized and de-indexed.