How black hat SEO can kill your business

What is Black Hat SEO?

This is a question many website owners may face. In general terms, Black Hat SEO refers to techniques that go against Google guidelines and industry best practices. Black Hat techniques include manipulating search engine rankings, cloaking, link spamming, and doorway pages to name a few. Whereas, White Hat SEO, as the name suggests, is the complete opposite. White Hat techniques follow Google guidelines and mainly focus on producing quality content. Yet, many business owners feel they have the need to hire a Black Hat SEO company, as White Hat SEO companies tend to carry high prices and broken promises.

If your site uses Black Hat SEO, here’s how it can damage your business:

GOOGLE PENALTY

Google is serious about its ranking algorithm and is always striving to provide users with the best search experiences possible. With the assistance of Spider Bots, Google can easily penalize pages or sites that violate its Webmaster Guidelines. Spider Bots search the internet and “crawl” over websites for information before gathering it and transferring it to Google’s servers. These spiders regularly check for new content by checking sites in Google’s Index for new updates and links to pages they have never scanned before. If these spiders report an infraction in your website, Google could penalize you by downranking or delisting your website from the search engine entirely.

 
MALICIOUS CYBER ATTACKS

Ever heard of the story of a Black Hat company injecting websites with hidden text? This Black Hat company was soon later revealed to be a group of hackers who targeted more than 3,000 websites. Appearing as a trust-worthy SEO optimizer, these cybercrooks were able to penetrate databases, inserting extra content through random pages on their victim’s website. This is a common technique used by Black Hat optimizers to boost search rankings and at the same time allowing them to spread malware on compromised websites.

GREED

When you use Black Hat SEO, you no longer produce relevant material that fits your buyer persona. In other words, you no longer think about your customers. Yes, this method will help you generate more traffic, but will most likely attract the wrong visitors with little to no relevance. Your greed to rank higher on a search engine will only make your website become irrelevant with unattractive content. Which will only make your business appear dishonest to its users and competition.

Search engine optimization is more than the appropriate use of titles and meta data, but more about producing genuine, high quality content that provides true value. If you’re looking for ways to build website optimization and improve its SEO ranking, here’s how:

CREATING HIGH QUALITY CONTENT

A great way to deliver high quality and relevant content is to build inbound links with high authority websites and social media pages. Link building can improve your SEO rankings depending on the type of link being used. Internal links and external links deliver different benefits. Internal links work best if you are wanting to increase engagement or lower bounce rates, whereas external links increase website traffic and are far more beneficial to your ranking. The placement of your links influence Google’s algorithm, as Google values the first backlinks more than the last one. Choose helpful links, over harmful ones.

KEYWORDS

To improve user experience is to conduct a keyword search. It is important to choose the right keywords that have a direct association with your target segment. You could start with optimizing your page titles or placing keywords in the meta description. Another method is to add subheadings that could help users decide how relevant the content is to their needs. This provides an opportunity to have your website page become a snippet or answer box within the Google ranking pages.  

 
IMPROVING WEBSITE DOMAIN

To name a few ranking factors, your domain can have an impact on SEO. Factors like slow loading time, or even the domain’s name and address, can hurt your website’s ranking. Choosing the right domain name and address significantly impacts your SEO score, but it is important keep in mind that your search engine ranking also depends on the quality of your content and web design.

While it is true that some websites may run well using Black Hat SEO, quality content will always win. Website owners who choose to use Black Hat techniques are only looking for a short cut solution that will only benefit them in the short run but damage them in the long run.

Fast tracking your search engine ranking comes with a cost and there are better ways to get to the top.

SEO is a marathon – not a sprint.

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