What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is a set of ill practices carried out in order to rank higher in Google search results. These techniques are called black hat as they are against the search engine guidelines laid out by Google. Some such commonly used SEO techniques include Keyword Stuffing, Cloaking, Paid Links, Doorway pages, Hidden content & Duplicate Content. Let us discuss each one in detail.
White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO methods go directly against the various guidelines set up by search engines. Manipulating these guidelines and cheating your way to the front can lead to penalties levied by search engines. Still worse, you can be dropped entirely from search results. White hat SEO, on the other hand, is the most ethical and sustainable way to carry out your SEO activities without worrying about negative consequences.
Marketers should always rely upon white hat SEO methods. Offering a good user experience while simultaneously following search engine guidelines can prove to be a great benefit for websites. Not only is this technique sustainable, but can also result in higher rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs) for long periods of time
Black Hat SEO Techniques
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Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the stuffing of multiple keywords in one sentence. This technique refers to stuffing a page with keywords in an effort to rank higher in search results.
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Duplicate Content
This is one of the techniques where content from one page is simply copied by the website owner onto his own website. Stealing others’ goods is a crime, right
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Cloaking
Considered as one of the hacker-man techniques, this practice involves showing one version of your website to the Google bot and another version to the user.
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Buying Links
This is an ill-practice where the website owner pays money to another website to give them a link back. There are many agencies selling such paid links, which are often scrappy and low-quality
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Overly optimized pages
Do you know the saying: too much of anything is bad for you? The same applies to your pages. Sometimes SEO professionals get so busy trying to optimize their pages that they end up doing a tad too much. This includes using a lot of On-page elements like over-optimized anchor text, an extensive number of internal links, keyword-stuffed titles and descriptions, and content.
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Clickbait
Clickbait means an impressive and noticeable headline written to tempt the users to click on the link. This is a copywriting approach often used to draw attention by overemphasizing a topic in order to encourage a visitor to click on a link that leads to irrelevant content