Black Hat SEO Tactics Are Heavily Penalized by Google

Google Is Good At Identifying & Penalizing Black Hat SEO

Author

ambITious
December 05, 2023

THIS WEEK IN AI^SEO

  • 💀8 Black Hat Practices To Avoid

  • 🗡️How 10 Paid Links Killed This Website

  • 🥷FREE SEO Ninja Webinar Registration

  • 🤖3 Cools Tools To Try

Read time: 5 Minutes

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
💀8 Black Hat Practices To Avoid

Need To Know:
🤖 Black Hat SEO is like trying to trick search engines into thinking a website is more important than it really is. But just like a teacher can catch you cheating on an essay, search engines are smart and can often spot these tricks.

When they do, they might penalize the website by ranking it lower or even removing it from search results altogether. Black Hat SEO is a risky way to try to improve a website's visibility.

Top 8 Black Hat SEO Practices To Avoid:

  1. Keyword Stuffing: Overloading webpages with keywords in an unnatural way to manipulate search engine rankings.

  2. Cloaking: Showing different content to search engines and users. This deceptive practice can lead to a website being penalized.

  3. Hidden Text or Links: Placing text or links in your content that users can't see but search engines can. This often involves using text the same color as the background or hiding it behind images.

  4. Doorway Pages: Creating low-quality webpages loaded with keywords, mainly to rank high in search results, but they offer little value to users and redirect them to different pages.

  5. Duplicate Content: Copying content from other websites to increase the amount of content on your own site, without adding any original or valuable information.

  6. Link Farms: Participating in networks created solely for the purpose of increasing the number of backlinks to a website, which can artificially boost search engine rankings.

  7. Negative SEO: Deliberately using Black Hat practices on competitors' websites to harm their search engine rankings.

  8. Sneaky Redirects: Redirecting a visitor to a different webpage than the one they initially clicked on from a search engine result, often used to deceive both users and search engines.

Why It Matters:
💡Avoiding these practices is crucial because search engines, like Google, have become increasingly adept at identifying and penalizing websites that engage in Black Hat SEO. It's always better to stick to ethical SEO strategies that focus on providing real value to your users.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
🗡️How 10 Paid Links Killed This Website

Need To Know:
🤖 This is the summary version of a real website that grew SEO traffic to 150,000 visitors per month during 2019 in the highly competitive entertainment niche. Just 12 months earlier the site was running at around 5,000 visitors per month.

This is largely how the team grew the traffic:

  • Technical improvements, speeding up the site

  • Followed Google’s official Pagespeed guidelines, scoring 100/100

  • Added Google AMP (A mobile friendly tool created by Google themselves)

  • Researched keywords and analysed the competition

  • Hiring highly experienced freelance writers giving them SEO guidelines and keywords

And Then They Did This:
The site admin decide to go ‘Black Hat’. Using a service called LinksManagement. For a cheap price the admin obtained relevant links from sites with authority, it appeared this service was a seamless way to start building links. The admin ended up paying $120 for 10 links.

Everything went fine… until Google found out!

Google made a massive core update to its search algorithm on May 4th 2020. Traffic started dropping on May 5th, the day after. This update smashed the traffic.

One of its changes include in the core update was named EAT - Expertise, Authority and Trust. And trust was the one rule that was not followed. These guys had just tried to trick Google and it backfired badly.

You can read the full story here

Why It Matters:
💡Shortcuts and hacks for gaining traffic quickly using SEO does exist, furthermore trying to trick or pay your way to success rarely works in the long term and can do serious damage to traffic earned using best practices.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
📈Rank My Website #1 With SEO Ninja 🥷FREE Webinar

What you need to know:
🥷To master the art of SEO takes training and effort however that does not mean it has to be difficult. If you would like to learn how to rank any website on the first page of Google using the SEO Ninja 🥷method then join the FREE 30m min live webinar.

The "How To Rank My Website #1 with SEO Ninja 🥷" provides the strategy and the tatics to win the SEO game.

Here's why you can't miss this 30 minute LIVE event:

  • Learn the 3 Secrets to SEO

  • See how 🥷SEO Ninja was used to re-rate a website from position #579 to position #1 (actual site revealed 😱 in the during webinar)

  • Bonus SEO Strategies for beginners

  • Plus much more

How to register:
To register for the FREE 30 minute live webinar click here. (Attendee numbers are capped so if interested dont wait).

Learn more about ambITious agency
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