Blackhat SEO: Why You Need to Avoid It

Search engine optimization is, in many ways, like the Wild West of the web. A lot of people will do anything that it takes to improve the ranking of their websites. While “questionable” SEO practices were once the norm, there’s a new sheriff in town. And that new sheriff’s name is Google (and other search engines).

These search engines don’t want people using behind-the-back blackhat techniques to boost their rankings. So they’re penalizing these tactics. If you use a blackhat SEO technique and get caught (and chances are you will), you’ll be handed out a harsh punishment. Depending on the offense, you might even be banned from the search engine results altogether.

So what exactly are these blackhat SEO techniques we’re talking about? And how can you make sure to avoid them? We answer both of these questions and more in detail below.

What is Blackhat SEO?  

Fortunately, blackhat search engine optimization is easy to understand. It’s simply the practice of improving your website’s ranking by violating the terms of service of a search engine. While these techniques can sometimes be successful in the short term, they’re almost always caught in the long-term. On top of that, the vast majority of people consider blackhat SEO unethical.

So what’s so bad about blackhat SEO anyways? First and foremost, it’s almost always used as a shortcut to boost page rankings for websites that don’t offer any value. These unscrupulous and often scammy websites use blackhat SEO to impress the search engine crawlers while the actual content on the websites is lackluster at best. The goal of these search engines is to help you find the most relevant content possible and most websites using blackhat SEO just don’t do this.

Blackhat SEO Techniques to Avoid

Naturally, you can’t avoid using blackhat SEO techniques if you don’t know what they are. That’s why we’ve listed a few of the most common, and most harshly punished, below.

1. Keyword Stuffing

Keywords are good. Keyword stuffing is bad. While you can and should work relevant keywords into your content, you shouldn’t go overboard. While it can be tempting, using these keywords as often as possible will actually hurt your ranking. Your content needs to read naturally above all.

2. Hidden Text

Another common blackhat SEO trick is to use hidden or invisible text to add extra keywords, relevant or not, onto your webpage. People do this because the search engines are able to see these keywords but readers cannot. This allows them to stuff keywords without sacrificing the quality of their content.

3. Link Buying/Link Exchange

Inbound links are a big factor when it comes to your website’s search engine ranking. In other words, the more people that link to your website, the more relevant your content is supposed to be. But the big search engines are too smart for link buying or link exchange. All links must be natural.

4. Spinning Articles

Regularly updating your website with new content is always a good idea. It’s one of the best ways to improve your page ranking. However, some people just don’t feel like spending the time or money to create this type of content. So they use article spinning software to take a single article and have it rewritten into a handful of new articles. Most of the time these articles are poorly written and nonsensical. The search engines know these articles don’t provide real content.

Just Do Things Right!

What we’re trying to say is do things right. Put in the work and don’t take any shortcuts or use any tricks. Spending the time and money on great content and quality SEO is always better than taking the back road. The search engines are constantly getting smarter and blackhat SEO just doesn’t cut it any more.

If you need help with growing your rankings its all about going about it right way and increasing your brand online through proven methods, contact us today to see how we can help you increase your rankings, the right way!