7 Black Hat SEO Techniques That Are Killing Your Google Ranking

Google has warned that black hat tactics are "unethical, overly aggressive marketing efforts where a company tries to manipulate search engine results. Avoid using the most harmful black hat SEO techniques. There used to be more black hat SEO going on than white hat SEO. Getting top rankings in Google and other search engines is the only goal of any business. Blackhat SEO techniques killing an SEO campaign and gets your website banned from Google.
If the results of any SERP keyword tracker show that you are ranking poorly, you may have to look at the SEO tactics that you use.

There are two categories of approaches: 

  1. White hat SEO 
  2. Black hat SEO. 

In practice, Black Hat SEO covers all the methods that you can use to cheat the Google search algorithm.


However, the most important thing about them that you need to know is that they can compromise your performance. 

Nowadays, Google is clever enough to detect and punish the use of such tactics. 

8 Crippling Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid Like the Plague in 2018
7 Crippling Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid Like the Plague in 2018

Here is a list of some of the Black Hat SEO techniques that are killing your Google ranking. 
  • Keyword Stuffing 
  • Using spun content 
  • Spamming Social Media 
  • Using Private Blog Networks 
  • Hiding text that contains keywords 
  • Buying links
  • Cloaking 

1. Keyword Stuffing 

Keyword stuffing refers to the method of piling specific words in website content. Traditionally, Google tends to rate highly those pages that have the right keywords within the content. At first, some clever fellows thought that it was possible to trick the algorithm by including an abnormally enormous number of keywords in the text. Well, this trick worked for some time. 

Nowadays, the Google algorithm deliberately reads all the content that is on pages and detects an over usage of keywords. Therefore, if you are fond of using very many keywords in your content, then the chances are that Google detects this as a black hat SEO and penalizes you for it. 

2. Using spun content 

Google places a premium on original, well-written and relevant content. You should always remember that the company seeks to help people get the best information that they need when they conduct online searches. It is for this reason that Google punishes content that is not original. Content spinning works by cleverly changing a few lines of original text to make it appear different from the first one. 

Spinning content is bad for two reasons. First, it undermines the willingness of Google to provide its users with essential and useful content. Second, when you spin content, you deliberately steal the rights of the website on which the original content was published. Content is expensive. 

Therefore, for you to succeed in your SEO performance, you must be willing to invest in premium content as opposed to using unoriginal and useless materials. 

3. Spamming Social Media 

Social networks can be important sources of traffic to your site. However, it takes patience and a high level of intelligence to successfully use social media as a source of potential clients for your products. The basic approach is that you can integrate social media sites on your website. Under this approach, you can repost your content on leading social media sites as a way of attracting people to your website. 

As much as this approach works, it takes a very long time. In some cases, some individuals try to jump the gun by sending links to their sites directly to social media users. In some cases, others share an abnormally high number of links on various social media sites. 

However, the Google algorithm nowadays can detect such abnormal activity and flag it as an example of Black Hat SEO tactics. 

4. Using Private Blog Networks 

Private Blog Networks are some seemingly independent blogs whose main aim is to provide backlinks for a primary site. Many Black Hat SEOs nowadays believe that using this method is an effective way of increasing the credibility of a central website. By maintaining such networks, people who use this tactic can trick Google into ranking their sites highly. 

It is important to indicate here that this approach is self-defeating. Although Google has not developed the right method of detecting and dealing with it, the company has repeatedly warned users against employing this method. 

The problem with using PBNs, as they are commonly known, is that one gives users a raw deal. The private blogs do not exist to provide content to readers but to support the main site. Moreover, the fact that a user may resort to creating an artificial reputation for a site means that the website may not be credible in the first place. 

5. Hiding text that contains keywords 

Some webmasters are fond of using this age-old trick. People who use this method normally write some text that contains a lot of keywords in a color that is like the background of the web. In other cases, people hide the text behind images that are found on the site. 

The bottom line of using this approach is that you can trick the search engines into rating your site highly even if you do not have relevant content. When you hide text, humans cannot see it. However, the Google spiders that endless crawl web pages can detect the text. The intention of using this trick is to mislead the spiders into ranking sites as very credible based on the hidden keywords that humans cannot see. Thus, this trick primarily helps you to hide your stuffed keywords. 

6. Buying links 

Link buying is one of the oldest black hat SEO tricks. The basis for this method is that you do not have to wait for genuine web owners to link back to your site; you can easily pay them to do that. However, Google understands that link building is a long and tedious process. 

Therefore, when you suddenly have 100 sites linking back to your website, then Google can detect that you must have paid for the links. 

7. Cloaking 

Cloaking is another old Black Hat SEO tactic. Some practitioners use special scripts to confuse the Google crawl spider about the nature of the pages on the sites. The script deliberately hides the spammy nature of a site and presents to the Google bot a clean and fake version of the pages. 

Thus, the Google spider can easily rank such a site highly when the website is full of irrelevant and even harmful content. 

Conclusion 

In summary, these are some of the most common Black Hat SEO practices that many people use. You should remember that although some of these tactics are effective to some point, it is just a matter of time before Google learns how to detect them. 

And as it has always been the case with every other Black Hat SEO technique, these and many other methods get published severely by Google.
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