What is black hat SEO?

It is important that you utilize ethical SEO practices in business that serve to make your website relevant, credible and visible in search engines. Such ethical practices are known as white hat SEO. They are designed to legitimately ensure that your website ascribes to the ethical codes set by search engines so that you will get a long term investment for your business website. This is referred as the systemic and genuine way of getting proper ranking and visibility to your website. However, there are scores of SEO professionals who prefer using short cuts with the aim of getting fast raking for financial or monetary gains.

What is black hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is the use of unethical, aggressive SEO techniques that go against policies and rules of search engines. It’s basically a practice that various SEO professionals use to fool the search engines into believing that a particular website is relevant, useful or popular in contrast to what the website actually is. In simple terms, Black Hat SEO strategy is mostly employed by individuals who are seeking quick returns for financial gains. It’s a practice that will cause your website to be delisted from all search engines and have you lose all the investment you’ve made in your website. As a cardinal rule, never attempt to employ black SEO strategies as a way of getting higher ranking by fooling the search engines.

If you are new to SEO, you are probably wondering what these black hat strategies are how to avoid them. Dubious SEO professionals can do more harm than good to your website. Utilizing of practices that violate the terms, policies and rules set forth by search engines is suicidal to the well being of your website.

What are black hat SEO strategies that you need to avoid?

• Keyword stuffing which entails saturating your content with target keywords.
• Article spinning which entails duplication of content by specifically having the same content rewritten multiple times.
• Cloaking which is an attempt to create a distinct way in which search engines view one version of your website while your visitors view a different version of the same.
• Description/Meta tag stuffing which entails having your Meta tag descriptions populated with certain target keywords with the aim of fooling search engine crawlers to pay attention to the content on your website.
• Hidden text as the name implies refers to text that has been configured to be unreadable or invisible with the aim of increasing keyword density.
• Building backlinks such as link farming or use of unnatural links from third parties
• Google bombing which basically refers to a technique black hat SEO professionals’ utilize to reduce the ranking of a competitor. It is basically used with the aim of manipulating a competitors search results.

There are countless Black Hat SEO techniques that can harm your website irredeemably. Others include:

• Content automation
• Sneaky redirects
• Doorway pages
• Link wheels
• Rich snippet markup scam
• Automated queries to Google
• Cyber squatting
• Cookie stuffing
• Typo squatting
• Social networking spam

Does Black Hat SEO strategy work for you?

The decision to use black hat SEO is dependent on you as a person and your goal. If you are seeking for short term rewards, black hat SEO could be for you. However, if you are seeking to build a brand and a reputation for many years to come, you should stick to white hat SEO strategies, like creating good content for your website and using natural links by social media marketing, which serves to put your site in good books of search engines. Aspire to use ethical methods of improving your Google rankings, visibility and credibility!