In the field of SEO, we need to follow certain guidelines. The rules are designed to create a useful, relevant, and safe environment and to ensure a quality user experience. Ranking requires keeping up with current and changing SEO trends and constantly adapting your approach to respond to algorithm updates.
On the other hand, there are people (spammers) who try to trick search engines and bring organic traffic to their websites to obey the rules but break them instead. Black Hat SEO strategies make the content duplicate, these links become unrelated content and well-placed keywords become keywords. And it shows something very important.
This shows us that a good SEO strategy is like a black hat strategy. You just have to do it in moderation. And it also means that as a white-hat SEO strategist, you can learn some tricks from a black SEO strategist. Let’s face it, you and Black Hat SEO want the same thing. They both want to claim your search traffic pie, which makes up 93% of the online experience.
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Why are White Hat SEO Techniques Important?
If you’re not just doing white-handed SEO, Google and other search engines may ban your site. As the first search engine, billions of people visit Google every day, and each visit can give a new user a chance to discover your site.
Google is undoubtedly a powerful source of traffic for your website, and a ban can lead to a sharp drop in website traffic and even business. Think about all of the work on your website, then what happens if the most used search engine on the internet is blocked. Worse, if you get banned from Google there is no guarantee that you will ever be put back on the list. A lifelong ban on Google would have enormous consequences.
Black Hat SEO Techniques
Unlike White Hat SEO, Black Hat SEO violates all the rules. Of course, this will initially work depending on which method you use, but it’s a shorter-term strategy. Google updates its algorithm quite regularly, and if you do something you know, at some point you’ll have problems, you probably will too!
Most of the black hat techniques I go through have stopped working and using them will damage your placement options. But it’s good to know what you sometimes don’t have to do, so let’s take a look at them.
Cloaking
In this case, websites have different HTML codes for the visitor and HTML codes for the Google web browser. This worked for a while as some websites had to show search engines what it was about.
Automatic Article Spinning
You may be thinking, “Okay, what if I’m not stealing content but just turning words into synonyms to make most of the new content unique?” For a while, people use automated programs to change (unravel) the words in an article to create individual content, publish it, and then rate it. It would have similar keywords, similar meanings, and websites that generate a lot of “new” content could be higher. However, the content did not read very well, was very similar to the original article, and did not offer anything unique or new.
Link Farms
This is the case when several websites are linked to each other. Backlinks are a great signal to Google that your content is interesting to others, which is why it has worked in the past. But now it’s easy to find a backlink with a profile that looks unnatural. If the websites leading to your site are not touching, then it is quite obvious to Google that you are trying to cheat.
These are the most common black hat techniques. While some have worked in the past and others may still work today, if you know what you’re doing, I don’t recommend it. With that in mind, here is a list of various things that white SEOs can learn from black SEOs.
Convert Black Hat SEO Techniques Into White Hat
1. Backlinks and PBNs
If you know what SEO is, those are backlinks. Backlinks have long been one of Google’s key indicators of which websites should be placed on the first page and which should be placed on the last page. The strength of your link-building strategy is the highest factor in Google’s decision-making process.
White search engine optimizers often rely on honest reviews, guest blogs, and mutual partnerships to get backlinks. However, this is not the case with black search engines. One of the most important black hat SEO techniques for creating backlinks is the use of PBN (Private Blog Networks). PBNs have a pre-built network of inactive domains with SEO juice, which they then use to link back to your site.
2. Keyword research and stuffing
I bet your SEO friends told you about keyword research opportunities. Ultimately, keyword research is a really powerful tool in the SEO world. If you know what words people are typing into Google and targeting those particular keywords, you are more likely to be in the right place.
Of course, black SEOs know that too. And they use keywords to rank their websites because keywords have become common practice. But the way to do it is not annoying. It is inefficient. Reading issues aren’t the only reason this content doesn’t rank high on Google. This is also because Google knows the tactics of keywords and does its best to reduce the number of websites that use them.
Google doesn’t want the website to be ranked as it has the correct words in it. They want it to be ranked because it has meaningful content. So, if you don’t want to fill your pages with annoying and confusing keywords, you still want to add the right keywords.
3. Internal linking and the Wikipedia page
Google is a robot. By reading the content with you and me, we can quickly identify the purpose of the page and what it’s trying to talk about. And while Google has improved it over the years, it still has its drawbacks.
This means that you must do everything in your power to organize your content for Google. In other words, you need to make it easier for Google to understand what your content is and where to place it in search results. Then you have a much better chance of ranking for your keywords.
An internal link is when you move from one page of your website to another page of your website. The goal is to organize your content topics so that Google can easily understand what each page is about. Multiple plugins are being used including Rich Snippets & Schema Plugin to organize and manage the content on a site. A column page (or content column) is a page on your site that describes a specific topic. Column side refers to all content below, and all content below refers to column sides.
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