8 Black Hat SEO Techniques that could get your website banned
There are many webmasters and unscrupulous SEOs who try to trick the search engines in order to achieve higher rankings. Their questionable SEO tactics, which are known as “black hat” SEO techniques, are often effective in the short-term, but they eventually get websites penalized or banned. Below are 8 common black hat SEO techniques that you should avoid.
1. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is one of the most common forms of search engine spam out there. It involves placing targeted search terms in your website content numerous times. Repeating keywords excessively is not only frowned upon by the search engines – it also makes your content read horribly. Your SEO success ultimately depends upon your ability to consistently provide people with engaging content, and keyword-stuffed content is anything but that.
2. Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique that involves designing your website so that the search engines see one thing and visitors see another. Cloaking can be done with programming or redirects. If one of your competitors figures out that you’re cloaking, you can be sure that your site will get banned.
3. Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are web pages that are created to spam a search engine’s index. Doorway pages are optimized to rank highly for specific keyword phrases. As its name suggests, a doorway page serves as a doorway to your main website. Doorway pages are generally skimpy on content and provide little value to visitors.
4. Hidden Text
Hidden text is text that is the same color as the background. Nowadays, the search engines can easily detect it when text is set to the same color as the background of a website. Some webmasters try to get away with it by creating an image file that is the same color as the text and setting it as the background. However, your website will quickly get banned if a competitor figures out that you’re using hidden text and reports you.
5. Buying Links
The practice of buying and selling links goes against the guidelines of major search engines, but many SEOs still do it. Buying links is seen as a quick way to achieve higher search engine rankings because the more backlinks your site has, the higher it will rank. However, the practice is frowned upon by the search engines because many webmasters use it to manipulate their sites’ rankings.
6. Title Stacking
Title stacking, or the practice of adding multiple title tags to a web page, can temporarily increase traffic to your website but it will get you penalized or banned if the search engines find out about it.
7. Interlinking
Interlinking refers to building several websites and then linking them together in order to build their link popularity. Interlinking is difficult to detect, but users may figure it out if several interlinked websites achieve top rankings for target search terms.
8. Article Spinning
Article spinning is the practice of using a program to rewrite your content and create multiple versions of it. Every time you spin an article, approximately 90% of it remains the same. Many webmasters spin content and then distribute it to article directories. This tactic used to be an effective method for increasing a site’s search engine rankings and boosting traffic, but most sites that build links this way have been penalized since the Google Panda update was implemented.