Black Hat SEO: Why can Google penalize you?
Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2024 10:14 am
Black Hat SEO, also known as negative SEO, is the SEO trap that all marketers should know and to what extent it can be beneficial for your company.
Let's start with the basics:
What is Black Hat SEO?
It is nothing more than doing a series of “cheat” actions to quickly position a website in search engines. Isn’t that cool? Well no, because this can lead to penalties.
Some of these techniques are keyword stuffing (the excessive use of keywords), cloaking (based on showing different content to users of a website and to crawling robots such as GoogleBot) and using private link networks .
How can Black Hat SEO or negative SEO harm us?
Google can penalize us in two different ways: Manual and algorithmic
Manual Penalty
These are the easiest to detect, especially if you are registered in Google Search Console, because you will receive a notification explaining why you have been penalized and how you should proceed next .
So if you don't use Google Search Console yet, we recommend you sign up.
Algorithmic Penalty
This is more difficult to detect, since Google itself does not warn you about it.
However, it can be detected by seeing the traffic drops, for example, with tools such as Google Analytics. This penalty is not far from what happens every time Google changes its algorithm .
This penalty is problematic because Google does not give you information on how to fix the problem, but you will have to find out for yourself what the problem is. Once it is detected and fixed, you will have to wait for a new algorithm update to check that the problem has actually been fixed.
What Black Hat SEO tactics should you not use in your B2B company?
Keyword stuffing
Stuffing is putting a keyword into a page over and over again , so that Google thinks it's being written by a bot instead of a person.
Some examples:
Lists of phone numbers
Text blocks with lists of cities or countries
Repetition of the same words or phrases constantly that ends up being meaningless or does not seem like natural language.
Cloaking
It is about showing the web user one thing and the search engine another , just to encourage users to click on the link to increase their positioning.
It is important that you adapt the content of your website to different users, and that your website meets a need for them. And this is what you should put in search engines. It has already been seen that deceiving search engines is impossible.
You can see how Google views your website from Google Search Console.
Beware of redirects
Although these are accepted, they are only recommended in certain cases, such as when changing domains or websites . However, clicking on a specific link and having it redirect to another link can be grounds for a penalty if it is not justified.
Low quality or duplicate content
Low-quality content is considered to be content that is copied from one list of telegram users in cambodia website and pasted onto another without proper citing, which is against copyright.
Copying/paying is strictly prohibited.
As Hubspot says :
Bait and switch is another black hat method of tricking search engines. This involves creating content around a topic you want to rank for. Once the page is ranking in results for this topic, the content is switched to something else. This creates a negative experience for users as the content they expect no longer exists.
Payment links
Paying a website to link directly to your site is a Black Hat SEO practice . In fact, search engines like Google state that “anything that manipulates PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines .”
Private blog networks
Just like link farms, private networks serve to exaggerate to the limit the number of links and keywords that can be on a given website.
Let's start with the basics:
What is Black Hat SEO?
It is nothing more than doing a series of “cheat” actions to quickly position a website in search engines. Isn’t that cool? Well no, because this can lead to penalties.
Some of these techniques are keyword stuffing (the excessive use of keywords), cloaking (based on showing different content to users of a website and to crawling robots such as GoogleBot) and using private link networks .
How can Black Hat SEO or negative SEO harm us?
Google can penalize us in two different ways: Manual and algorithmic
Manual Penalty
These are the easiest to detect, especially if you are registered in Google Search Console, because you will receive a notification explaining why you have been penalized and how you should proceed next .
So if you don't use Google Search Console yet, we recommend you sign up.
Algorithmic Penalty
This is more difficult to detect, since Google itself does not warn you about it.
However, it can be detected by seeing the traffic drops, for example, with tools such as Google Analytics. This penalty is not far from what happens every time Google changes its algorithm .
This penalty is problematic because Google does not give you information on how to fix the problem, but you will have to find out for yourself what the problem is. Once it is detected and fixed, you will have to wait for a new algorithm update to check that the problem has actually been fixed.
What Black Hat SEO tactics should you not use in your B2B company?
Keyword stuffing
Stuffing is putting a keyword into a page over and over again , so that Google thinks it's being written by a bot instead of a person.
Some examples:
Lists of phone numbers
Text blocks with lists of cities or countries
Repetition of the same words or phrases constantly that ends up being meaningless or does not seem like natural language.
Cloaking
It is about showing the web user one thing and the search engine another , just to encourage users to click on the link to increase their positioning.
It is important that you adapt the content of your website to different users, and that your website meets a need for them. And this is what you should put in search engines. It has already been seen that deceiving search engines is impossible.
You can see how Google views your website from Google Search Console.
Beware of redirects
Although these are accepted, they are only recommended in certain cases, such as when changing domains or websites . However, clicking on a specific link and having it redirect to another link can be grounds for a penalty if it is not justified.
Low quality or duplicate content
Low-quality content is considered to be content that is copied from one list of telegram users in cambodia website and pasted onto another without proper citing, which is against copyright.
Copying/paying is strictly prohibited.
As Hubspot says :
Bait and switch is another black hat method of tricking search engines. This involves creating content around a topic you want to rank for. Once the page is ranking in results for this topic, the content is switched to something else. This creates a negative experience for users as the content they expect no longer exists.
Payment links
Paying a website to link directly to your site is a Black Hat SEO practice . In fact, search engines like Google state that “anything that manipulates PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines .”
Private blog networks
Just like link farms, private networks serve to exaggerate to the limit the number of links and keywords that can be on a given website.