AVOID these Black Hat SEO tactics
As with most things in life there are people who always do the right thing and there are those that seem to always do the wrong things. When it comes to SEO there are many strategies a business can implement to help them rank higher in search engine searches but not all of them are good. Bad SEO strategies are often referred to as Black Hat Tactics. These “tricks” attempt to bluff search engine results into ranking sites based on corrupt means that offer little help to the person searching.
Here is a list of some of the common techniques we have seen that should be avoided, as they could result in your site being banned:
Keyword Stuffing is where you cram multiple instances of keywords that you want to found by into a sentence/paragraph to the point that it no longer makes much sense. The aim is to hope that search engines will return the site as a result thinking the content is relevant.
Hidden Text was a tactic that has been employed for years by web developers and means putting white text (full of key words) onto a white background. Search engines are beginning to search for these instances, so lately we have seen developers putting text on very similar coloured image files set to the background in an attempt to avoid being found, but it is only a matter of time and certainly not worth the risk.
Duplicate Sites was a tactic that will rarely works these days. It was a tactic, especially with affiliate programs, where developers would duplicate a site they were trying to promote and make a few changes to it, then would put it online in the hope that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture the sales instead. It does still happen these days if the developers change just enough of the content to avoid detection from the search engines. If you see this has happened you should report it.
Remember it’s in a search engine’s (like Google) best interest to only return the most helpful results for you when you’re searching, otherwise you will eventually get fed up and use an alternative search engine. That is why techniques such as these should be avoided at all cost as the Googles of this world are out there actively looking for these people to put a stop to them, and there is nothing worse than having your site banned.
Yours in good design and SEO strategies,
Belinda
