Avoid the Black Hat Techniques for SEO
In the domain of online marketing, black hat is a term that refers to cheating and manipulating search engines for better and higher rankings. These techniques are frequently used by many online marketing ‘experts’ to improve the visibility of their websites in online search results. It goes without saying that reputed search engines are getting wise to these unnatural and unethical techniques. Nevertheless, these practices continue to loom large. Here a few black hat techniques that a real SEO professional should stay away from:
Doorway Pages: These are simple HTML pages that are customized with a few chosen keywords and phrases, programmed to be visible only to specific search engines and their spiders. Doorway pages are typically named after the specific keyword being targeted and once the user reaches the doorway page, he/she will be directed to the ‘real’ or actual website which may not even be related to original keyword. The result? – A poor impression of the ‘actual’ website.
Link Spamming: A common black hat technique, link spamming is simply a way of creating inks that direct users to the websites of your choice. This is done with the help of automated software. The software is devised to access unprotected blogs through anonymous web proxies and leave links in their comments. With a link on several blogs and online forums, you may be able to direct some traffic to your website but if these links are left on blogs unrelated to your site, they will either be ignored or will tarnish your online reputation.
Keyword Stuffing: Some of the naïve SEO ‘experts’ still feel that this can work and do wonders for their websites! Using a website as the dumping ground for as many keywords as possible is categorically a black hat technique. It is naive to use keywords ad nauseam because even if search engine crawlers get duped and do make the website visible in their results, the actual visitors will quickly move away from the website when they find banal or useless content (unrelated to their search).
Invisible Text: This is about using text that is of the same color as the background page of website. This makes it possible to place many keywords on a page and attract more crawlers. However, popular search engines including Google have become wise to this technique and tend to ignore the sites while publishing results.
Do these and other black hat techniques work at all? They certainly do BUT only for people who are interested in short term gains and then a long lasting damage to the repute of their website and business!
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