If we look at life, mostly people take up things in the extremities. It can be either good or bad and right or wrong. Things are no different in the SEO world. Here everything is in white or black. But, let me tell you that things depend on the perceptions and viewpoints of the people. It all depends on which side of the fence you stand!
People have a perception that black hat SEO tactics are not good, they are unethical. But let me tell you that I am not here to debate on the same and come up with my side of the story. I don’t want to say whether they should be used or not. What I am posting here is the things that are currently happening in the SEO world.
For all those people out there who have no or less idea about SEO, let me tell you that black hat SEO techniques are used to boost up the rankings of the page but they are not considered to be the good practice according to the guidelines of search engines. Some of these practices include hidden text, cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc.
So now here in this post, let us check out those black hat SEO techniques that still bear fruits.
1) Keyword stuffing: We all have seen content on the web pages where keywords are packed up here and there so that it is able to find a better place on the search engine result pages. Now Google does not like it at all! But, let me tell you that there is an ethical way to do it.
Making use of user-generated tagging is another best way to do keyword stuffing without having to face the aftermath of Google. Moreover, you don’t have to worry about the disturbed word flow because of keyword stuffing. You can achieve this by allowing your readers to inculcate the tags in their comments for your posts. This even creates metadata which is more relevant towards your content and which can be readily accepted by the search engine.
2) Creating duplicate content: This simply means that you are reposting an article on your site or on any other related sites without making any changes to the main copy.
The right way to do so is simply pack it up in a new way and use differently. Some of the best ways to achieve it are:
- Convert the content into slideshows or video and post them at some other place where people can be looking for the same information.
Update the post and include some new insights and ideas. Get the same post published and provide it with a link to the original content. You can even expand the idea on the post and elaborate it.
3) Article spinning: This is almost similar to the technique of using the duplicate contents and now more and more number of people are making use of it. Here in this technique content from a website is taken and using a special software new content is rephrased. The new content is then a bit modified so that it is not get caught by the plagiarism tools.
4) Private blog networks: Inbound links are used by Google to rank the sites. Every inbound link is considered as a point and with each point, your site ranks better. This used to be a thing before the Penguin update, which took the complete focus from number of links to quality of links. Today, having low-quality links can harm your site and so links are created differently.
By going for private blog networks, the website owners will get a chance to create a number of blogs on a network which points towards their site. This way it will become tough for Google to identify the act or even can take time to find these tactics and react.
The main issue with PBN is that you need to have at least 10 quality and informative posts generated. Creating the posts and setting up the network consumes a lot of time. Moreover, each site on the network needs to be registered under different fictitious names and should even make sure that the IP addresses does not conflict.
Most of the time this technique definitely works but, you need to put in a good amount of time and effort which you could have otherwise used for the straightforward methods to increase the SEO value of your site.
5) Negative SEO: In this type of SEO technique, you are not working on the ways to improve the stand of your website on the search engines. Rather, you are trying to attack the competitor websites and bring them down.
Here a huge number of spammy links are bought, and they are pointed towards the websites of your competitors in the market. This will attract the attention of Google towards all those websites and they will ultimately get penalized. This technique can seriously end up giving negative results.
Even today many of the SEO practitioners make use of this technique and it still works too. But, no doubt it is unethical. So better you can try to focus on the competition rather than going for this tactic. You can even try to build up a professional relationship and get guest posts from such sites for links.
6) Cloaking: Cloaking is a black hat SEO practice where search engines will be shown different URLs and the users will be shown something very different. This technique is carried out by the websites to rank for the desired keywords while the users end up getting results that are not at all relevant.
7) Hidden texts: In this kind of black hat SEO technique, a good number of keywords in white text are placed on the white page. This kind of texts are not visible to the visitors on the page but then, search engines can find them and index.
Final word:
For how long black hat SEO campaigns can work? You can go with the practice until and unless you are caught. So it becomes necessary to make sure you don’t leave any breadcrumbs behind. The efforts and time you need to put in these techniques will make you feel that it would have been better to play safe according to the rules.
Author info: Maulik Patel is a Creative Entrepreneur and managing director at HireSEOAgency, top seo company of India. He has more than 7 years of experience in small business growth strategies, content marketing and technical seo.
