Schedule Free Consultation

What are low-value or black-hat links?

December 3, 2019

Search engines are now being used to drive traffic to your website. SEO is a fantastic way to boost your website's traffic and generate more clicks. Because Google's algorithm is always changing, we should always follow their lead by providing white hat links and avoiding black hat link building.

Black hat link-building strategies are some new techniques for driving more traffic to a website by exploiting loopholes, allowing a particular website to rank higher than it should through an "organic" search. Google, for example, is fully cognizant of such attempts to exploit the system in order to boost SEO rankings. Currently, Google has implemented a method to sanction such exercises, so the majority of these links are no longer as powerful and useful efficient as they once seemed to be.

What is Black-hat SEO?

Black-hat SEO is typically described as an undesirable practice that has the power to boost a page's ranking in a search engine result page or SERP. These methods are not tolerated by search engines and affiliate sites. A list of black-hat SEO strategies and tactics has been openly condemned on Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Bing's Webmaster Guidelines.

Marketers who are caught using black hat SEO methods may face penalties from Google, which could result in their website being removed from search engines or their metrics dropping drastically.

If you want to stay above board with Google and other search engines, here is a list of tactics that are deemed black-hat and should not be tolerated and practiced at all:

Keyword Stuffing

Stuffing your content with keywords is as bad as it sounds. Because keywords are crucial for rankings and traffic, black hat SEOs will stuff as many as they can into a piece of content. They reasoned that by stuffing your articles and content with keywords, the site would have a greater chance of ranking well.

Keyword stuffing is:

Google's algorithm is becoming smarter by the day, and it can detect when a website's material has been tricked and keyword-stuffed. As a result, you must create unique content while keeping search intent in mind. Content created for humans outshines content created for bots.

Duplicate Content

The practice of posting the same content on different pages of a website in order to attract search engines is referred to as duplicated content. This strategy is expressly prohibited by search engine guidelines. Because search engines prefer original and unique content, content that is purposefully recreated across multiple domains is regarded as one of the worst black-hat techniques. 

When the result obtained in Google is not original, it is a sign of search engine ranking manipulation, which instantly results in a poor user experience. To guarantee that your pages are targeting the right signals to search engines, use a duplicate content checker.

Low-quality content

When a writer or computer paraphrases an original article, it is considered low-quality content. These types of content were created easily and used in outreach or link-building campaigns. These contents offer no real value to their readers and are only used for link building.

To hide keywords inside of their pages, some website owners use text that is the same color as their background. This will enable the site to rank for keywords that appear to be invisible. This drives traffic to a site via irrelevant keywords, resulting in an immediate increase in traffic.

Cloaking

Cloaking is another black hat SEO tactic used to trick search engines into ranking content for a particular search term that is unrelated to the context of the webpage. Cloaking displays one piece of content to users while another piece of content is displayed to search engines.

Cloaking, in fact, is misleading because it tricks search engines into granting the desired ranks for target keywords. Besides that, it breaches Google Webmaster Guidelines by displaying insignificant results to users.

Article Spinning

This is a technique comparable to content duplication that is becoming more prevalent on black hat. It's the next level of plagiarism, which also necessitates the use of software that takes the duplicated source and rewrites it as a new and unique post for potential use. Effective alteration reduces the likelihood of being detected by any plagiarism tool.

Spam Comments

This strategy is designed to generate free backlinks. Links obtained in this manner are 100 percent nofollow and transfer no SEO juice, making this method a waste of time, but it is one of the most typical black hat techniques. You can also do this manual process, but there are tools currently available that will instantly flood the web with spam comments.

If you have a comment section on your blog or website without checking the quality, there is a possibility that you will receive spam comments, which will leave a bad image on the users and lower the quality of their user experience. Prevent spam comments from invading your site, making your readers uncomfortable, and discouraging them from leaving insightful comments.

Keep in mind that spam comments can harm your blog by making it appear abandoned and unprofessional. This is why, after filtering out spam with blocking plugins, you should wait and approve the comments.

Paying for links

Backlinks are extremely important in an SEO strategy and cannot be overstated. The more backlinks your site has, the more Google will regard it as reputable and authoritative. It can be difficult to obtain links to a newly launched website. This is why most SEOs pay for links. Several websites and blogs will charge SEO fees for the placement of content and links on their website.

In some cases, this could cost anywhere from $15 to $200 or more. Google guidelines prohibit paying for links because it is yet another method of tricking search engines. The more paid links and backlinks a site has, the more likely it will be ranked higher in SERPs. Even if this is not useful or relevant content for the user's search intent, it will emerge as a top result due to its high backlink count.

Conclusion

The following black hat procedures are dangerous to use because search engines will eventually discover them. Yes, these strategies will significantly increase traffic to a site; however, the links are not organic, and search engines such as Google will not assign value to these links, resulting in the page. 

Some tactics will undoubtedly generate results in a short period of time; fortunately, others may go overlooked for a lengthy span of time. But, in the end, Google's algorithm will certainly be constantly updated, sooner or later exposing and penalizing some illegal practices.

Back to blog
menu linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram