Black Hat Methods That Can Ruin Any SEO Campaign

Even if you are a SEO newbie who is going to work for the first day, classification of SEO into two different approaches is one of the very first things that you must have proper knowhow about. SEO is classified into two main approaches, i.e. white hat SEO and black hat SEO.

White Hat SEO is the fair play: It simply means that if you are following every Google Webmaster’s guideline in order to get better results from your SEO campaign, you are essentially working on white hat SEO strategy. The main elements that are the part of white hat SEO include creation of high quality content, working on in-depth keyword research, and tending to answer the users rather than search engine.

Black Hat SEO is the burglary: What the burglars basically want is the quick money through shortcuts. They do not care if it is someone’s hard-earned money they are stealing. Same is the scenario with black hat SEOs. They try to occupy the top positions in SERPs through shady SEO practices, and they have no concern with the fact that there must be someone else more deserving for that position. In other words, they do not believe in fair competition.

Nevertheless, good news for the Jedi’s and bad news for the Sith’s is that Google has become smart enough to identify and rectify any wrongdoing happening under its nose. With that said, the black hat SEOs are going to be left with no choice other than refraining from the search engine ‘burglary’ and start working on the best Amazon SEO practices. Google has been teaching ethics for a long time; now it is slowly coming into the mode in which it is going to be the enforcing authority.

So, what are the black hat SEO techniques that can truly ruin any SEO process? Let’s discuss.

Bad practices related to links

Link is the most valuable asset in the field of SEO. But if that asset is used in the wrong way, penalties are slapped by Google. The most considerable one is the Penguin Penalty. Some grey and black hat practices related to links are mentioned as under.

• Many people prefer buying links from high authority websites in order to evade the hard work involved in organic methods. It surely seems the quicker way but it’s absolutely against webmaster’s guidelines set by Google.
• Another way is reciprocal link building. This practice involves link exchanges taking place between two websites. Although it may seem a logical solution for link building but Google’s advice is strictly against it. One obvious reason is that the two parties involved in this exchange do not care about information sharing. They care about the link juice.
• The act of adding links to the footer is done for the purpose of replicating a link in the bottom of every page. Unless this link building involves some logic and context, it’s a blacklisted practice that you should avoid.
• Blog commenting is one of the most common link-building techniques that is used by majority of practitioners. What’s dangerous in it is the act of commenting and putting a link in the comment section of a website without caring about the context of that website.

Bad practices related to content

If your content is not aimed at helping the visitors, the type of penalty that you may face is the Panda Penalty. Things that you need to avoid in this regard are as under:

• Duplicating any content is just like stealing. Unless you have full permission by an owner, duplicating the content created by that owner will leave you open to receive a penalty.
• In order to draw attention of search engine, many of the content creators put too many keywords in the body of content. This practice has had its days but those days are now long gone. However, it’s an irony that many still follow this approach.

Although there are many other black hat SEO techniques out there but the ones mentioned above should be avoided on very first priority. However, it doesn’t mean that you should stick with the others. Black hat SEO in general is a blacklisted domain that can take away the authority and credibility of your website and get you blacklisted.