Black Hat Techniques and Why You Must Avoid Them

Below is a short list of SEO techniques you must avoid. New ones crop up weekly because “black hats” (unethical SEOs) are making huge money, like $100,000 a month or more, and it pays for them to use even criminally deceptive tactics to game Google. However, the search engines are getting smarter all the time, so make sure your website designer doesn’t dabble in unsavory SEO tactics and do things that will hurt you.

1. Cloaking: Showing the search engine a different page than what you show the user.
2. Hidden or invisible text: White text on a white background or in comment sections of the code, etc., will not be visible to the end user of the site.
3. Multiple instances of the same tag: Overuse of html tags just for ranking purposes.
4. Mirrored/duplicate sites: Submitting identical pages with different URLs.
5. Keyphrases in your keywords’ meta tags that do not directly relate to the content of your page.
6. Automated submission services: Companies that bombard the search engines with submission requests.
7. Overuse of keywords: Stuffing way too many instances of a keyphrase or keyword in your text.
8. Meta refresh tags: Using meta refresh code to send people automatically to a new page.
9. Link farms: Sites that exist only for linking.

You don’t engage in any of these shadowy practices, do you?

photo credit: aka Quique via photopin cc