Semalt Expert Describes 15 Black Hat SEO Strategies That Can Ruin Your Brand

In the recent times, Google and other search engines have been on a hunt for sites that uses black hat SEO tactics. In this regard, it is evident that black hat SEO practices will ultimately put websites at risk.

Jack Miller, a leading specialist of Semalt, outlines here black hat SEO strategies that can affect startups while striving to grow in internet marketing.

1. Cloaking

It is the most common black hat SEO tactic of attracting traffic to a website through deception. It allows a site owner to provide totally different URL or content to the site visitor with what is available on the search engine

2. Gateway or Doorway Pages

Refers to pages messed, stuffed and, entirely over equipped by strong keywords with a weak proposition value. The pages lack any helpful, valid or valuable information. They only contain rich keywords that catch visitors' attention and redirect them to a different webpage.

3. Paid Links

One of the requirements of ranking on a search engine is link building. The process is not easy and entails a lot of efforts, quality, and hard work. Paid links make everything straight for the site owners. They do not have a mind about the quality of context, but insert the desired anchor text or link up with the anticipated content. It is considered as a black hat SEO strategy.

4. Hidden Links and Tiny Texts

The most irritating black hat SEO technique, whereby site owners include illegible links and texts at the bottom of a webpage or corners where the two are visually untraceable. The texts and links are of the same color as the background and hence stuffing any keyword that is disregarded by visitors.

5. Duplicate Content

It is simply theft or stealing of other people's content. The work must not be an entire match, but even a close match is considered to be a duplicate content.

6. Article Spinning

Refers to re-writing published content either manually or by the use of bots. It is common with lazy marketers who do not want to think on their own.

7. Keyword Stuffing

It is a process that involves overloading keywords on the site's content. In this case, site owners align keywords pointlessly with meta tags.

8. Spam Blogs

These are pages that contain meaningless contents that are overloaded with hyperlinks. Spam blogs are created with the intention of generating backlinks for associated websites.

9. Referrer Spam

The tactic of using nonexistent URL that redirects to a website that a hacker will bombard with continual requests to a visitor.

10. Private Blog Network (PBN)

That refers to a category of high authority websites that link a money website with quality anchor texts.

11. Page Swapping

It denotes changing an already popular, indexed and ranked page with traffic that is different from the original version.

12. Link Farms

It means building a system of sources where a website's URL is linked up with irrelevant and low-quality contents.

13. Cybersquatting

Refers to the copying of trademarks or buying domain names.

14. Typosquatting

Denotes copying of a competitors' URL and misspelling it intentionally when building a new domain.

15. Social Networking Spamming

This means advertising to visitors on social networks with undesired videos and comments.