Black Hat SEO refers to the unscrupulous means that some SEO businesses and teams use to manipulate
search engine rankings. By finding loopholes in the search engines’ algorithms, these tactics boost website rankings for a time. However, Google and the other search engine giants will always find out. And once they find out, those websites’ rankings will drop under the weight of the penalties that they accrue.
Some Black Hat
SEO techniques to avoid include:
– Keyword stuffing – The overuse of keywords on a page to try and get the search engines’ attention. It’ll definitely get their attention, but not in the way that businesses would want. Avoid keyword stuffing with quality content and naturally embedded keywords.
– Hidden text and links – Hiding text and links means that users can’t see them on their end, but search engine crawler bots can. This means the content on the page isn’t useful for users, which lowers user experience and increases the bounce rate. Eventually, the search engines will notice that and find out the trick behind it.
– Duplicate content – Duplicate content is self-explanatory. This type of content is directly copied and pasted from other content already on the website or another website. Duplicate content is helpful for no one, and search engines won’t endorse anything that could lower user experience.