White hat SEO
Techniques and practices that provide value to users and abide by search engine rules are known as white hat search engine optimization.
Generally speaking, white hat SEO means you focus on the user and optimize with people in mind rather than taking advantage of search engine algorithms. Google has outlined certain guidelines when it comes to tactics and techniques for optimizing your content. By following the approved practices, you are doing white hat SEO.
Create a well-designed website. When doing so, keep in mind your brand and the impression you want to leave on visitors. Ensure the site is mobile-friendly. Many people use their phones to browse the web, so it’s worth spending some time on the user experience of your website for mobile as well. Less is more, so don’t try to do too much and clutter your site with unnecessary elements.
Rather than steal content from people, it’s worthwhile to create unique posts that offer a different perspective from what’s already been published online. Consider your headline, structure, keywords, etc.
Instead of buying links, build them through guest posting and publishing original content people will share and link to. Buying links costs money and oftentimes isn’t the best quality.
Black hat SEO
Strategies and techniques that do not abide by search engine rules, and can result in websites being penalized or removed from search results are known as black hat SEO. Nevertheless, these techniques can still increase your ranking. Attempting to deceive users or breaking the approved guidelines comes with a level of risk.
As such, white hat SEO is typically recommended.
Black hat SEO is more expensive now than ever before and also a lot riskier, especially if you are doing unethical or illegal practices such as hacking websites. It is likely you will incur a penalty, which greatly impacts your SEO ranking in a negative manner. Moreover, black hat requires in-depth knowledge of websites and how they work. In order to take advantage of loopholes in the algorithm, you have to understand search engines in a way most people don’t.
Techniques of Black hat SEO:
- Keyword stuffing
- Over optimized alt description
- Irrelevant keywords
- Hidden/ invisible links and text
- HTML-heading over optimized
- Over -optimization of links
- Copied or duplicate content
- Cloaking
- Content automation
- Article spinning
- Bait and switch
- Scraped content
- Link exchange
- Guest post spam
- Web rings
- Blog comment spam
- Spammy footer links
- Shady redirects
- Link selling
- Link buying
- Directory listing
- Parasite hosting
- Google bombing
- Mirror sites
- Private blog networks
- Toxic sites
- Social network spam
- Malicious active content
- Buying reviews with links by offering free products
- Link farm
- Commercial anchor text keywords
- Paid advertorials
- Doorway or gateway pages
- Rich snippet Markup spam
- Typosquatting or URL hijacking
- Cybersquatting or domain squatting
- Cookie stuffing or dropping
- Negative SEO
- Trackback spam
1. Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing is the old method of optimizing the sites. It was mostly used and famous before the 2000s. Until this time Google did not start noticing that content with a keyword density is not relevant for the users.
Keyword stuffing is the process of using the same keywords so many times in the small piece of content or text. It is obviously not healthy, natural, and unique. It does add any value to the content. It leads to bad user experience and you can also get penalized for bad quality content by Google Panda Algorithm. This technique is considered as black hat SEO technique.
2. Over optimized alt description: Over optimizing the alt description is also not a good idea for SEO. Image alt descriptions are supposed for providing a little bit of info about an image, so if in case the image is not loaded by the browser then the user can have an idea about the image. It does not mean at all that you will add the same keyword to every image instead of useful text.
3. Irrelevant keywords: Relevancy is the key for SEO techniques. Some SEO specialists ignore relevancy to rank your page high on SERP. This is not the good way of getting a higher rank. Moreover you will not get traffic by using unnecessary keywords.
4. Hidden/Invisible text and links: Hiding links and text for the purpose of building links comes in various shapes and sizes. Google has discovered all schemes: hiding text or links using CSS to position text off-screen, using the same color font as the background, setting font size to 0 or hiding a link to a single character.Not all hidden text and links are bad for your site. For instance alt description for images, a script for java or code for flash files is acceptable. These two techniques will help you to improve the experience of your site with the search engines.
5. HTML heading over-optimized: Using multiple H1 tags on a page is very popular these days. Using H1 again and again on a page makes it stuffed. It is suggested to use limited H1, H2 and H3 when essential on the page.
6. Over optimization of links: Webmasters find all kinds of scammy ways of ranking. This black hat SEO technique happens when you forcefully place internal links on the homepage for pages like “About us”, “Contact us”, “Products” and so on. It’s not only impractical but also useless because those pages have a lot of traffic as they are, and it’s better to have deep links to strengthen your internal links.
7. Copied or duplicate content: Duplicate content is an enemy of SEO. The content that appears on more than one site is referred to as the duplicate content. It can also be stolen from other places (URLs). It just put the search engines in trouble to search for real content from all the duplicate content and show the right information. That’s what Google actually does. It can not show the duplicate information to users.
Those were olders days when the duplicate content did not harm the site. But in these days you can get penalized by Google Panda for using duplicate content.
8. Cloaking: Cloaking is the process of presenting the different content to users and search engines crawlers to gain the traffic. It is considered a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines as Google Penguin penalizes because it provides different content than they expected or searched for.
9. Content automation: Content automation is building the content from online tools and scripts which require zero effort from the writer and publishing it to the website. This type of content is not useful for the users, moreover does include the rules for SEO like formats, use of HTML headings, paragraphs, images, alignments, and many more. People may assume it is an easy way to generate the content without any hard work but it is not considered good content by the search engines. Google only likes the valued, well written and unique content.
10. Article spinning: It is an act of rewriting the existing content to escape from duplicate content and to create new content to look unique in front of search engines. It is considered as black hat SEO technique as you do not add any value to the content that can be informative for the searchers. If you have some new information about a topic that you already covered in the article then you should add the new information in the existing article as an update. This will help you to rank well and boost your optimization.
11. Bait and switch: Bait and switch is a false way of changing your content just to get a page to rank. The first step is to write a page for Google with a set of keywords, and after it ranks, the author changes it with another project or product. When users enter the site, they see something entirely different. This is indeed a crafty idea, and the person who came up with this technique was creative. This cheesy way of tricking Google might have worked well in the past but now it will get you banned and if you “hit the jackpot” you could be subject to a lawsuit.
12. Scraped content: It is the act of stealing the content from other publishers with the help of scripts and posting it to your own site. It is illegal and against Google guidelines. You can use software to get information about who is stealing your content and complaint about it.
13. Link exchange: It refers to an agreement between two sites to rank in Google. It is considered a link scheme that would not let your site rank in SERP. There are alot of sites that offer to give you free and quality links. It is easy to exchange the links, but you can get a penalty for that. For instance someone has linked his site similar to your site, then you request that person to link his site to your site and you will do the same for him. This is how links are exchanged.
14. Guest post spam: This is one of the techniques to get backlinks. People send messages to bloggers and request them to publish their article with a link and most of the times its a do follow link. The people who send requests for guest blogging on a site can hurt its ranking if the site they link to has bad user experience.
15. Web rings: Multiple sites that are connected between them in a circle network to rank and get traffic from related websites create a web ring as shown in the image below. Sage Well was one who came with a script to develop such a concept, when it began to become popular before Google times. To be a part of a web ring, you need to get approval from a web master. Even doing bad things became harder and harder.
Web Rings
16. Blog comment spam: The act of building the links by commenting on the blogs and sites to your site or blog without analyzing if that blog is relevant to your website/blog or not, is known as blog comment spam. People just check for if they provide the linking on the blog post to share their site. Hence it is not the right method for optimizing the sites.
17. Spammy footer links: The footer links that are mentioned just for the purpose of ranking and cheating, are called spammy, scamming or junky. These types of links do seem like natural links. Many people use this idea and in the end it will lead to rank loss.
18. Shady redirects: Redirects play a vital role in SEO. IF the original page of your site has been changed or moved you can use 301 page redirect. It is a good practice. But over the years, it began to be used for bad SEO technique. Webmasters take advantage of expired domains to keep the link juice. They are redirecting the old website to their site. In this case using 301 redirects as a shade of gray hat SEO. You could easily fall into the dark area of SEO if the expired domain is not relevant. Another example of shady redirects is practiced on online movies. May you have experienced that whenever you click on the play button it redirects you to other sites, which are mostly unrelated.
19. Link selling: It is against Google guidelines to sell the links to pass domain authority. It will de-index your website and cut your traffic to half. You can get penalized for that by Google. So be careful, do not attempt this practice.
20. Link buying: There is no difference between selling or buying links. Many sites say that they are qualitative, do not trust them. Stop this practice just to receive link juice. You will lose both money and time for ranking and traffic.
21. Directory listing: It is not good practice to buy or register your business on low quality directories. It is useless to register your site on these kinds of directory that have bad influence, low quality or are not well known. But there are good directories as well. Yahoo directory is one of the good directories. Not everyone can register on this directory as there are some rules to get registered. Before getting placed in this directory you need to have an account on GoogleMyBusiness, Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin and then see what option will fit best for your business type.
22. Parasite hosting: It is also considered as black hat SEO technique. It is the process of gaining access to a site, creating a web page on it and injecting it with a lot of keywords and links pointing to the black hat seo practitioner’s commercial page. Parasite hosting is set up for taking the advantage of authoritative domains from Google. In this they will receive traffic for their site and money from those who want to buy.
23. Google bombing: It is a way of influencing the rank of a page by artificially creating the number of links to it and anchor text used for that. A black hat SEO practitioner will manipulate Google’s algorithm by helping one-page rank for an entirely different keyword. This happens because it is the same anchor text used for the pages that link to that page in particular.
24. Mirror sites: A mirror site is the reflection of the original site. The mirror site contains the content from the original site to increase the ranking. The bad guys out there will try and convince you that they are using this technique just in case of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. DDoS is a cyber attack where multiple compromised systems are used to target a single system to access important (personal) information.
25. Private blog Network: Collection of blogs created by a person to build links to a site and to help it rank in Google, is termed as private blog network. It is a powerful method of building numerous links from different domains to a site. The owner of this network has privileges to change the desired content. He can alter the content at any time, he can decide how many and which links he wants to keep or manipulate the content and links whenever and however he wants to improve the ranking. Private blog network is created by using expired domains.
26. Toxic sites: If a site is created for the purpose of building links and it contains one of the issues like low authority links, think content, high number of outbound links, or footer links then it is considered a toxic site. You can hurt your business if you have links on toxic sites.
27. Social network spam: This is a new form of spamming. Spam in social networks is known to appear as links in comments to different posts, unrelated to the site: as sharing malicious links in irrelevant groups/ people/pages, private messages sent to all types of people/pages at one time or several times.
28. Commercial anchor: text keywords: Commercial anchor text keywords are those money keywords used to generate the financial value. If your site has fewer or not at all non-branded keywords, it will show that your Anchor text profile is not organic at all.
29. Malicious active content : This type of content uses malware software through animated websites, Java applications, Javascript, Flash content or relying on browser plugins to display video, audio files or download files on the computer. The most common types of malware are considered adware, bots, bugs, rootkits, spyware, Trojan horses, viruses, and worms. Not only is this kind of behavior against Google Guidelines and will get you penalized big time, but it is also illegal.On the other side, if you are a user, the best way to avoid being a victim of such software is to install an antivirus and update it regularly, avoid downloading files from unknown websites, keep away from shady sites or to click on ads that look too good to be true.
30. Buying reviews with links by offering free products: People send free products in exchange for reviews with links appearing. It is not to ask your customers for reviews but not with links. Using this method in an excessive way could get you down, rather than up in the search results.
31. Link farm: Link farm is a collection of websites connected with each other , manipulating your link profile by increasing the number of inbound links. It is against Google guidelines as Google sees link farming a spammy way of getting links. The content of a website that participates in link farm has text covered with irrelevant hyperlinks linking to random sites. This technique was famous when page rank mattered, but now Google changed this rule, now the sites involved in link farm will get penalized as the generated links are considered as unnatural links.
32. Paid advertorials: A significant change occurred when it was discovered that people were paying for advertorials to pass PageRank and since PageRank was officially declared dead , it does not mean that now paid advertorials are not against Google’s guidelines. When you use this method, you have paid links. Paid links could also pass authority. But though you can get penalized by Google.
33. Doorway or gateway pages: Doorway pages refer to the practice of inflating a site for a particular query in SERP using some cloaking and sending the user on a page that doesn’t have any connection with the query whatsoever. It is an adapted way of redirecting, a more crafty one. Those who use this technique want to rank higher in SERP in an unnatural way, of course.
34. Rich snippet Markup spam:Structured markup data can be a great way of formatting how your site appears in the search results when somebody looks for information. Also, it will help index your site. On the other hand, if you are creating irrelevant rich snippets markup you risk getting manually penalized by Google for this scammy technique.
35. Typosquatting or URL hijacking: This hijacking method is based on a typographical error to create malicious domains to look similar to well-known brands. This error counts as common misspelling, unnoticed foreign spelling, an abuse of the Country Code Top-Level Domain. The reason for this “affiliating” practice is to profit from the trademark name and brand’s fame.
36. Cybersquatting or domain squatting: To get the financial benefits, the cybersquatting technique is used in which domains that are similar to your business or trademark are registered. It contains the word “squatting”, which means acknowledging a public place without permission. Fraudsters who practice this technique could receive lawsuits because they gain money. They are redirecting people who came on the fake domain to an expensive pay-per-click advertising site.
37. Cookie stuffing or dropping: Many people use scripts, pop-ups, toolbars, images embedded in message boards for a publisher to receive money. This technique is called cookie stuffing or cookie dropping. For instance, a publisher sends a visitor to the abcd.com site and he gets credit for every sale made. You must know that stuffing cookies is an illegal practice.
38. Negative SEO: Negative SEO means attempting the methods that are totally opposite to the SEO techniques that are legal and follow Google’s guidelines. Negative SEO cuts traffic and decreases visibility continuously. People do not use these techniques for their own site. They use them for competitors to falsely report them to get penalized.
39. Trackback spam: TrackBack was used only to facilitate the communication between blogs by sending pings. A ping is a message sent from a blogger to those who are connected to him. Using it moderately or only you have a new article is not considered spam. Though, when you improperly use the TrackBack feature to get visitors on your site and send them numerous pings, it’s counted as natural.
Although white hat SEO requires time and effort, following approved guidelines and techniques will pay off in the long run. If you aren’t following Google’s guidelines and you are exploiting loopholes in the algorithm, then you are doing black hat SEO. It is a risk, requires knowledge, and can cost money. Thus, this e-book will share white hat search engine optimization techniques you can implement for your company’s website.
