Black Hat SEO Practices Can Result in Penalties

On September 10th, 2019 / By Hamzah Khadim

Using unsavory practices in efforts to boost your search engine rankings was once common place, before search engines developed complex algorithms. Today, the use of these practices often result in severe penalties that can take you from the top ranking search result to being found on page 10 or even 100!

For those, who do not know what Black Hat SEO is, it is a set of methods used to manipulate search engine rankings and the placement of those results on relevant searches. It is worth noting, many small businesses find themselves in deep trouble because they are unaware they are using Black Hat SEO, largely due to a lack of education about acceptable and White Hat SEO practices.

Some of the more common Black Hat SEO practices used include:

• Using Doorway Pages – Doorway pages are consider a form of online spamming and are often stuffed full of keywords to try and confuse search engine algorithms, with redirects to the same landing pages.
• Redirects that Are Irrelevant – Page redirects can be frowned upon if the landing page does not have the same content as was displayed in the search results.
• Cloaked Pages – These are landing pages, used along with irrelevant redirects to take people to a different site than what they expected.
• Scrapping – Copying content from another’s site and posting it on yours is a highly frowned upon practice which will result in penalties.
• Hidden Links – Some site will hide or embed links in images to other pages in order to fool search engines and make it appear like they are credit backlinks.
• Irrelevant Linking – Buying, selling, or exchanging links with others to redirect people from your site or from theirs to yours can hurt your rankings if the links take people to irrelevant websites and content.
• Using Apps to Automatically Create Content – When content is poorly written or generated automatically by a software app, the result is poor grammar and unnatural language.
• Hidden Text – Hiding text should be avoided. If the content is too big to fit on the page, it is acceptable to use expanding/contracting text boxes, but it is vital to ensure the reader knows this is an option.
• Spamming Content in Comments Sections – Sometimes your site visitors will take advantage of your comments sections and post user generated content spam, like irrelevant links to various sites.
• Stuffing Keywords within Content – While keywords are not as huge of a ranking factor as they once were, they are still taken into account. The excessive use of keywords, and attempting to use keywords unnaturally within content will hurt your search rankings.

As you can see, some people could easily make these mistakes and not even realize they were hurting their search engine rankings. To ensure your website and its content adheres to the best and White Hat SEO practices, contact Logik Digital at 1-866-307-0086 to discover our proven SEO strategies and solutions to take your site to the next level.