In the world of SEO, there are two types of activity: “white hat” and “black hat.”
White hat SEO is all the stuff that you do to improve the ranking of your webpages in keyword results that the major search engines allow. Activities that fall into this category include things like content creation, rich media creation, writing descriptions under your YouTube videos, and building organic followings on social media. In all these cases, the company legitimately EARNs traffic by giving users things that they want.
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There is, however, another type of SEO dubbed “black hat.” The fundamental distinction here is that firms that try it are usually attempting to boost their ranks in search results without earning it. In short, they’re trying to cheat.
A quality SEO company will always use white hat approaches to help you beat out the competition. But if you try to do SEO yourself, you might want to cheat – and that can land you in a lot of bother.
Here are some black hat SEO techniques that will eventually roast your ranking.
Keyword Stuffing Using White Text On A White Background
There might be many mentions of the word white in the title for this technique, but that doesn’t mean that it is above board – far from it. Some businesses have taken to using white text on white backgrounds to increase the number of times that they mention a particular keyword on their pages without interfering with the user experience. The user sees just regular text while the search engine algorithms pick up on all of it, including that which is invisible to visitors.
Search engines, like Google, however, are cracking down on this practice, both automatically and manually. If they discover that you’re doing it, you could see your rankings for certain keywords crater.
Keyword Stuffing In General
Keyword stuffing used to be one of the ways that companies “optimised” their content for a particular search term. Those days, however, are now long gone. Google, Bing and the other large search engines are all wise to these tactics now. If you shove five or six keywords per paragraph into your website text, you’ll get caught.
You can understand why search companies hate this type of behaviour – it wrecks the user experience. People don’t want to go to websites where the phrase “dog food” is used over and over again. It’s incredibly annoying.
Duplicating Content
Creating quality content from scratch is a time-consuming and costly endeavour. For this reason, some firms try to get around it by duplicating content – copying and pasting, basically.
In general, that’s a bad idea. If search engines detect duplicates, they’ll de-list your page, removing it from the rankings altogether (unless users specify options to include it, which they won’t). Again, this is something you’ll want to avoid.
Clickbait
Finally, some people try to drum up traffic by presenting clickbait – enticing ads and page titles that are too good to be true. Again, you’ll want to avoid doing this, especially if you can’t back it up with a real product.
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