Did you ever come across the term, “black hat SEO?” If not, you should go through this write-up from the beginning to the end. According to the specialists working with the Best SEO Company in Noida, black hat SEO refers to every unethical practice in helping a specific website rank higher on search engine platforms like Google. White hat SEO is what you need to avoid getting penalized. Now, how will you know whether your service provider is using black hat or white hat strategies? If you knew a few things about the latter, it would prove exceptionally useful. Here are a few black hat SEO tactics you should be aware of.
- Paid links: The popularity of any link helps Google rank websites. If several websites link to your platform, your domain authority will increase. Then again, the websites linking to yours should be equally famous. Among black hat strategies, there’s one in which a service provider will suggest opting for paid links. Based on Google’s own definition, a paid link is one, which you didn’t acquire because of your authority. You got it because you paid for it. Google is strictly against such links and is currently on a revenge spree of shutting down link farms and paid links. You don’t even need any tool to determine whether a link is genuine or not. If the anchor text appears random with no connection to the link itself, it’s probably a paid one.
- Stuffing keywords: Another black hat SEO tactic is keyword stuffing. There was a time when keyword stuffing used to be a norm, but not anymore. Today, Google will penalize any website where it spots keywords used more than necessary. If you ever come across a keyword or a phrase that appears to be out of context or unnatural in any way, it’s the perfect example of keyword stuffing. Then again, it can be a bit challenging for you to identify keyword stuffing because Google keeps changing the just-right percentage value of keywords you must insert in any content piece. The best way to identify it is to check the title, meta description, and introduction.
- Hiding links: Hidden links are less common these days, but it’s possible to stumble upon them now and then. Hidden links are precisely what the phrase sounds like – they are links a user won’t notice. However, they won’t escape the antennae of search engine spiders. They will surely find and flag them. Google detests placing links behind images, off-screen links, texts with zero font size, using a white background with white text, and linking a small part of a text. You should be able to pinpoint hidden links by exploring the website’s backend. Or, you can resort to an SEO tool to analyze the entire link profile.
- Redirecting or cloaking: Both these processes are somewhat similar, and both of them are part of black hat SEO strategies. In short, cloaking and URL redirecting are events through which search engine crawlers and users see two different types of content. You probably found a few websites strewn across the internet that takes you to an entirely different site. It’s what Google describes as sneaky redirecting. The purpose of doing it is to force visitors to a different website than they want to explore. If your SEO service providers do it on your web platform, you should get it reversed. After that, you must terminate their services.
Endnote
These are just a few black hat SEO tactics. In reality, there are many more. Fortunately, the Best SEO Company abhors these strategies. After all, if they do resort to black hat methods, it will tarnish their reputation, as well as that of their clients’. So, when you need third-party digital marketing agencies to look into your project, you need to find out whether they use black hat tactics or not.
