If you have just become introduced to SEO, you are still fairly familiar with multiple aspects of this practice. While looking for someone to perform your SEO work for you, you may actually encounter some businesses and “experts” who are actually what we call “Black Hat.” It is important that you understand the distinction between legitimate SEO methods versus those which will ruin your business over time.
At Actual SEO Media, we only work through completely legitimate and beneficial means. We want to explain Black Hat methods to you so that you know who to avoid in your search for an SEO company.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Let’s talk about black hat SEO.
Black Hat SEO describes practices that intentionally go against search engine guidelines and exploit them for rankings. While this may not seem terrible at first, there are actually long-term consequences to this which can leave your business flailing. Anyone who takes advantage of this system while knowing the future consequences is intentionally doing your business duty, no doubt while taking your money and saying nothing.
What Are the Consequences?
Lower search rankings – since black hat opposes terms of service, your rankings will take a dip.
Being removed from search engine results – search engines can completely remove you from their results if you are found to be using black hat techniques. This could do serious damage to your business.
Little to no results – Black hat exploits loopholes, but once these are resolved, any results that you had will disappear. In fact, it’s uncommon that there are ever any substantial results at all. The results you do have will only last for a very small amount of time.
Customers will have a poor experience – after using black hat methods, your website and content will appear to be spam, and many users will not trust this. Many people may be led to think that your business is not legitimate and will advise others against it as well. This can prevent many people from visiting you for business.
How to Avoid Black Hat SEO
There are plenty of warning signs and red flags for black hat SEO (search engine optimization) content. Here are some of them which you will be able to spot, even with an untrained eye.
Low-Quality Content – when you visit their website or articles, you may notice that it is all poorly written and badly structured. The website will be hard to navigate or look ugly, and the writing will be full of typos and spam words. Since quality writing and web content are not cheap, these people will take many shortcuts which become obvious.
Keyword Stuffing and Duplicates – you may notice that certain words and phrases are being repeated over and over, even where they make no sense. Or, you will go to a new page and see all the same content written. Avoid this at all costs!
Spamming Comments – you will see many comments on other blogs with links back to their website. Spam is never a good way to gain internet traffic.
Get into contact with Actual SEO Media today.
Contact Us
Give us a call or visit our office. To learn more about our consultations and black hat SEO, visit this page. Now that you know how to How to Avoid Black Hat SEO, you can take your business to Actual SEO Media!
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