6 Black Hat Practices That Can Damage Your Seo Campaign

1. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the process of repeating a keyword in a page’s content to get its ranking on the first page of a search engine’s results.

If you’re familiar with the term “keyword density” then you probably know that keyword stuffing is carrying the same meaning.

The truth is, keyword stuffing is an outdated and obsolete SEO tactic that doesn’t provide any lasting results.

And search engines have updated their algorithms to detect this practice and penalize websites using keyword stuffing in their content.

Instead of spamming your article or content with keywords, you might want to consider synonymizing them instead.

For example, instead of writing “cheap shoes” you can instead write “affordable shoes” or “low-cost shoes.”

Google and other search engines should be able to understand you if you need to write this way.

2. Cloaking

Cloaking is another black hat SEO tactic that you should avoid when optimizing your website for search engines.

Cloaking is the practice of making search engine bots think that a page’s content is something different from what the users see in their browsers.

This is accomplished by adding a code to a website in such a way that the search engine bots will see one version of a site while the real users will be looking at another version of it.

Cloaking is against the terms of service of popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo, so your website could get banned if you use this tactic to fool them.

These days, cloaking is easy to do and even easier to detect.

Some cloaking examples are hiding links, hiding text ads at the bottom of a page, opening multiple sites in one browser window, and using JavaScript to hide content from an end user.

So don’t waste your time on cloaking because search engines can spot it quickly enough and ban your website from their search results if they suspect you’re cloaking.

3. Article Spinning

The other black hat SEO technique we should avoid is article spinning.

Article spinning is the practice of taking a piece of content and rewriting it using synonyms and different words.

The main reason to avoid article spinning is that the content you are reproducing is not giving additional helpful insight to help your readers.

Instead, you are just rephrasing and only repeating what is already out there.

It is often the case that you might end up plagiarising other’s people’s work when spinning the content.

There are tools that can help to detect plagiarism such as Copyscape, but if you are able to achieve 100% free plagiarism for your spin content, it would become unreadable.

It would take a lot more effort to produce an original spin content piece. So, why bother?

Even in the age of content repurposing, article spinning is still a taboo and a black hat tactic.

Writers would invest more time to write unique content and avoid the complication of spinning low-quality content.

So avoid article spinning just to be safe.

4. Link Farming

If you had heard of link farming before, then you’re probably familiar with the penguin algorithm update that Google carried out back in 2012.

Experts say that Penguin was the first major algorithm update ever launched by the search engine giant in a bid to penalize websites that were using spam techniques to manipulate the search results.

What is link farming?

Well, in layman’s terms, it’s the act of getting as many links as possible to your website. Link farming is a scheme where a webmaster would purchase or rent links in a network.

One of the most popular link buying networks back then was SAPE and backlinks.com.

If you are considering because of the effortless link acquiring, then please do not waste your time or money.

5. Content Automation

We do not lack content for our website, right?

Especially with all the AI writing tools mushrooming these days.

But does content automation deliver quality results?

The simple answer is no.

Content automation is known as a content spinning program that showcases automated content generation. It is used to create an article on the fly by spinning out an existing article from a list of keywords.

The issue with content automation is that it will never ever deliver human readability content.

We are not against the use of these AI writing tools, in fact, we do encourage the usage of the tool to enhance or speed up your writing process.

But this has to maneuver and patch your human writing work to deliver unique content.

Black hat content automation that produces hundreds of articles in a day might ring some alarm.

With the latest Google helpful content update, creating quality content for your website would be the only way going forward nowadays.

6. Over Optimization

Over-optimization is a new term that pop out recently due to some findings that have shown to do with overwork with your SEO practices.

By reducing some of those elements, businesses and websites are able to regain some of the ranking losses.

The over-optimization can affect your SEO negatively.

One of the examples is the exact match internal link anchor, interlinking your webpages with the same keywords might not be very natural.

A better way to counter this issue would use a variation or descriptive anchor text for your internal links.

Another one is the over-optimization of the title tag and URL.

Quick Guide: Learn how to optimize title tags the correct way.

Over-optimization of the title tag can affect the site’s CTR negatively.

Instead of using your primary keyword in the title tag, it would be best to use a more descriptive keyword.