Black hat SEO is a practice that goes against search engine guidelines in order to get a site ranking that is high in the search results. This is an unethical practice and often results in penalties.
There are several black hat techniques and keyword stuffing is one of them. A few other commonly used black hat techniques are cloaking, sneaky redirects, poor quality content, paid links, abusing structured data, blog comment spam, link farms, and private blog networks.
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Keyword Stuffing
Keywords play an important role in SEO and digital marketing services are careful to use the right keywords in the right quantity. Black hat techniques like keyword stuffing ignore any guidelines regarding keywords and fill the content with irrelevant keywords in an attempt to manipulate where the page ranks on search results pages.
This can create a bad experience for users, as multiple variations of keywords are added to the content despite them not adding any value to the content. It may also result in the page ranking high for irrelevant queries.
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Cloaking
Cloaking is a black hat technique where one piece of content is shown to users while a different piece of content is shown to the search engine. This is done in order to make content rank high for various terms that are irrelevant to the content.
This is often done by spam websites in order to avoid a search engine bot from detecting the spam content the page serves its users.
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Sneaky Redirects
A redirect is when a user is sent to a different URL than the one they initially clicked and there are instances where redirects are used by a digital marketing agency. Instead of using them for their intended purpose, black hat SEO misuses redirects by sending a search engine crawler to one page and all other users to another page.
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Poor Quality Content
A common practice in black hat SEO is to create poor quality content as well as content that is scraped from another website either by a bot or a person. While it is no longer easy to do this, there was a time when search engines like Google were not good at recognizing content that had been copied from other websites and black hat SEO took advantage of this.
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Paid Links
Buying and selling links is strictly banned by search engines and Google states that “any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”
Despite the risk of penalties, black hat SEO tactics violates the guidelines issued by Google and other search engines.
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Abusing Structured Data
Structured data, also known as rich snippets and schema, allows digital marketing agency teams to change how their content is displayed on search engine results pages. Black hat SEO tactics provide inaccurate information in structured data to fool search engines and users.
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Blog Comment Spam
This black hat technique involves including a link to their website in blog comments. This used to take place quite a lot, but today, there is little room for this tactic. This is because search engines like Google updated their algorithm to discount any links in blog comments.
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Link Farms
Search engines look at various factors including the number of links that point to the website when they rank a website. Link farms are websites or a collection of websites developed solely for the purpose of link building and each website links out to the site or sites they want to rank higher on search engines.
Private Blog Networks
A private blog network (PBN) is a bunch of authoritative websites used solely for link building. PBN is similar to link farms because they both aim to exaggerate the number of links pointing to a website. Black hat SEO uses private blog networks because they link to the site they want to boost in the search results but do not link to each other.
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HOW TO AVOID BLACK HAT SEO
Any reputable SEO Marketing Company will take steps to avoid black hat SEO as they can result in penalties imposed by search engines. There are three main ways to avoid black hat SEO, starting with avoiding cloaking or tricking search engine crawlers by redirecting them to other pages.
Digital marketing services will also focus on writing only good quality content that is original. They would also make sure to avoid keyword stuffing and buying or selling links.