What Is Black Hat SEO, and How Does It Get You In Trouble?
Business owners who are trying to master content marketing spend a lot of time worrying about SEO. By all means, search engine optimization is enormously essential to your website’s rankings, traffic, and conversions. But if you inadvertently end up with black hat SEO on your site, you could have significant trouble.
For help with any of your website SEO, copy, or content, reach out to Kristin Ratten Content Services. We take away your confusion and create high-functioning content you will be proud to share. Let’s connect and get started.
A Brief SEO Primer
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a simple concept. It refers to the practice of making all of the content on your site visible and searchable by search engines such as, oh, let’s say Google.
The goal is to rank high on the search engine results page (SERP). This is a fancy way of saying that you want your website to show up on the first page of results that people see when they Google something.
And as much as we talk about ranking on Google, let’s not forget that other search engines exist also. About 7% of online searchers use something other than Google, such as Bing or Yahoo.
That might sound like a low number, but when we consider the global population, it represents about 546 million people. So, you want to get in front of those guys, too.
One of the biggest things that most people have heard of when it comes to SEO is keywords. These are the holy grail of optimization because they go to the intent of your content. The idea is to match your intention with a searcher’s query.
When Google or another search engine can spot that your web page is a good fit for the user’s search, they rank your page higher. Yay, SEO!
Optimization isn’t only about the keywords you put in your text. It also includes the following components:
Format and Design
Images
Meta Descriptions
Loading Speed
Mobile-Friendliness
High-Quality Writing
Links
You can see that SEO isn’t just one thing. It is an entire strategy that you need to implement holistically throughout your website. Or hire someone else to do it for you. But if you do, this is where you need to be careful.
What Is Black Hat SEO?
Think back to old western movies with their heroes and villains, and you’ll see where the term black hat SEO originates. These are the “bad guy” SEO practices. They are both unethical and harmful to your business.
Black hat SEO is anything that actively goes against a search engine’s guidelines. It is deceptive and does nothing to serve the searcher’s intent when they make a query. And it can, and likely will, cause your website to all but disappear from rankings.
And it can happen fast. It is a duel that ends quickly, with Google still standing while your website lays bleeding in the dusty street outside the saloon.
Many tactics fall under the label of black hat SEO, including the following primary offenders.
Keyword Stuffing
Popular among lead generation sites, keyword stuffing is exactly what it sounds like. It happens when the writer uses keywords repeatedly and awkwardly within the text to try to improve rankings. It makes your copy flow terribly and doesn’t serve the user in any meaningful way.
This practice often occurs with local SEO when business owners are trying to rank for particular locations. They may have heard that they should include their city and state in the copy. Yes, they need to do that. But it shouldn’t be stuffed into the text so often that it doesn’t even make sense.
Here is an example of how keyword stuffing might look:
“If you’re searching for “tow truck service near me” in Boring, OR, then you’ve found the best tow truck service possible. We serve our customers in Boring, OR with our top-notch tow truck service throughout Boring, OR. When you need tow truck service in Boring, OR, give us a call.”
This passage sounds terrible, doesn’t help the reader much, and will get a website into trouble.
Paying for Links
Having authoritative backlinks to your website is excellent for SEO. But paying for these links can sound the death knell for your searchability and rankings. Google and other search engines outright prohibit the practice of buying inbound links for your website.
It is also against the rules to offer free products in exchange for links. Search engine guidelines view this practice the same as buying backlinks. It’s legal to pay someone who specializes in helping you gain links organically, but not to pay a site to link to yours. So be careful!
Duplicate Content
Remember in school when you would get an “F” if you were caught copying someone else’s answers? If you put duplicate content on your site that already exists on another website, you will get a big old “F” from the search engines.
But instead of going to the principal’s office, your site will go to Google jail. And it won’t even get to make a phone call to tell you. You will just suddenly see an enormous dropoff in website traffic.
Google detests duplicate content. Do not be tempted to copy and paste from another site for your text. And if you hire a copy or content writer, be sure they don’t do that either. We can’t overstate how important this is.
The companion black hat tactic to copying and pasting is “spinning” an existing article. When a writer does this, they copy an entire page of copy and then change some words or phrases.
Have you seen the Friends episode where Joey writes a letter of recommendation for Monica and Chandler to adopt a baby? He uses a thesaurus for almost every word to make his letter sound smarter for the adoption worker.
That’s kind of what happens here. The writer thinks that they are making the text different enough that it will fool Google.
It won’t.
Next Level Trickery
Many other black hat SEO practices get a little more technical. Cloaking and redirects are two tactics that involve URLs.
They try to trick search engines into ranking pages high in the search results even though they have no relevant content. These scenarios are sort of a bait-and-switch technique.
White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO
All of these bad guy SEO techniques will cause your problems eventually. They are not worth the risk if you are trying to build a sustainable, authoritative business.
Instead, make sure you invest your time and money into white hat SEO. As you can guess from the trusty western movies of yore, these habits are the good guys. They actively protect and promote your website with the search engines.
When it comes to white hat SEO, the best thing you can do is create high-quality and useful content. Take time to know your potential buyers and what knowledge gaps they have. Then, fill those gaps with your expertise.
Having blogs on your site is one of the best things you can do for organic, authentic SEO. They should be the cornerstone of your content marketing strategy because they can do so much for you. As you build your content library, your website will perform for you.
You Don’t Have to Do It Alone
Most entrepreneurs do not love writing about their business. They may love talking about it, thinking about it, and growing it, but they rarely enjoy writing for their biz.
If that describes you, let’s schedule a time to chat. Kristin Ratten Content Services offers done-for-you blog subscriptions, email newsletters, and web copy. We help your website perform and convert so that your business can thrive. We can’t wait to get started!
