Emma Julie Fox works
as a writer for Pitstop
Media.
A Vancouver based SEO company that has
been helping businesses across North America successfully increase their search
visibility.
The Internet industry is just like any other. Blog and
website owners are expected to adhere to a set of ethics that will even out the
playing field for everybody. Search engines serve as the policing body that
sanctions websites that are found to have crossed the line from acceptable
search engine optimization practices to the prohibited.
Google by far is the strongest and most feared ethics police
on the Web right now. For most blog and website owners, there’s no bigger
punishment than getting penalized by Google and getting dropped from the SERPs,
demoted in page rank, and removed from the search engine’s index.
Defining Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is a term coined for practices that are
underhanded and manipulative in nature. Underhanded because it is practically
like cheating, and manipulative because they manipulate the search engine
ranking algorithms into making a website rank even if it doesn’t really deserve
to land a lofty spot at the SERPs.
This is what Google, Yahoo, Bing, and every other search
engine wants to avoid. They therefore identified the following practices as black
hat and deserving of heavy penalties.
1.
Link Buying
Links are considered valuable ranking
signals because ideally, they are like votes of approval from other webmasters.
The theory is that a webmaster will provide links to webpages that it considers
valuable for their visitors. This is why there was a time when people thought
getting inbound-links from just any source will give them valuable link juice
and went on to purchase links or got into arranged link networks with other
sites.
Today, paid links and link networks are
considered black hat because the motive behind them is always to rank higher in
the SERPs.
2.
Associating with Link Mines or Becoming One
One telltale sign of link buying is when a
page is embedded with so many external links. Red flags flare all the more if
many of those links are leading towards or coming in from completely irrelevant
sites.
There can only be two reasons for this.
First, if the website entered into a link buying or networking arrangement.
Second, if the webmaster foolishly and naively included links that are
irrelevant to his website or to an article’s topic.
3.
Copying or Scraping Content
Duplicated content is a huge offense in the
SEO world today. Search engines want to give websites their due. If a site
produced a very good article, then the credit should go to it instead of the
thousands of others that copied the contents of its article.
Besides, duplicating or copying content
violates copyright laws. Even with content that’s not patented, the offended
party can still file for a complaint for plagiarism.
Duplicating content is tantamount to
stealing, and that’s a punishable offense that everyone should be able to
understand.
4.
Keyword stuffing
Keywords are important signals that search
engines use as basis for coming up with results for search queries. Most of the
time SEOs can figure out what keywords their target audience is likely to use
in search engines. There’s
also Google AdWords to rely on for keyword research.
The problem arises when the keyword density
in an article or page is too high. It borders on search algorithm manipulation,
which is again what Google and other search engines try to purge.
Keyword stuffing also tends to compromise
the quality of the content. There’s only so many times you can mention a
keyword in a paragraph without making the sentences sound odd, grammatically
incorrect, and downright spammy.
Bear in mind that content quality is very
important for Google and other search engines today.
5.
Creating doorway pages and concealing links
Doorway pages are created to rank and
capture the attention of both Internet users and search engines. These are very
deceitful because they generally contain mediocre content and redundant
information.
But because they rank well for several
different keywords, users may still end up opening these pages—only to be
directed to another website that wants to sell some product or service.
Concealed links are the same. They hidden
within the text or made to blend with the webpage’s background so that readers
may accidentally click on them and boost incoming traffic for another
low-quality site.
These two strategies are manipulative of
search engines and deceive users. They are also considered as webspam. Even if
there is very good content attached to these pages, these offenses can still
pull down a website.
6.
Cloaking
There are those really clever webmasters
that design two kinds of websites: one that appeals to search engine bots, and
another that’s designed to please users. They make search engines see one thing
while presenting different content to human users.
This is a heavy violation because users end
up not getting what they are expecting to see based on the meta information
displayed on the SERPs.
Most of these black hat practices could propel a website/blog
into the first SERPs in a short time. Other than the fact that it’s unethical,
why is it important then to avoid black hat SEO practices?
First of all, search engines are no longer tolerant of
websites that pay too much attention to technical SEO without caring about the
quality of their content. It’s not just about keeping the playing field even
for all Internet entrepreneurs, but also about user satisfaction.
Google for example is making user satisfaction a priority.
It would not please users if their queries always generate mediocre or
completely unrelated websites that nevertheless end up there because of black
hat SEO. That’s why updates like Google Panda and Penguin are implemented.
Anyone even slightly familiar with SEO understands how bad
the repercussions can be if a website is penalized based on these updates.
Second, even a small mistake can bring down a website that
took years to build up. That happened to many websites when Panda and Penguin
first rolled out and most of those who were affected dabbled in black hat
practices.
Third, positive results borne out of black hat strategies
are only temporary. Considering Google is very watchful of websites today,
offending websites are quickly found and penalized. If your goal is long-term
online success, you need to really work hard for it instead of depending on
black hat strategies.
Nothing worthwhile can be accomplished in the online
industry without diligence, passion, and hard work. Everyday there will have
new competitors coming in, having the same hopes and goals as you. If you want
to achieve true success, do it without compromising your ethics.
