Worried about your Business Website Getting Blacklisted?

Worried about your Business Website Getting Blacklisted? Avoid these Black Hat SEO Tactics

October 7, 2016 No Comments

Featured article by Bill Williams, Top SEO expert

When hiring an SEO marketing company, ensure it only uses White Hat SEO tactics because trying to outsmart search engines with Black HAT tactics could not only lead to the lowering of your ranking in search engine results pages, but it could also cause your website to be banned.

Black HAT SEO tactics to Avoid

1. Hidden content: A top SEO expert will not stuff the site code with keywords. The different forms hidden content comes in are comment tags which are supposed to be used by developers for reminders, main content start, use of <noscript> tag, the use of CSS, text on a similarly colored background, and text that is excessively small.

2. Meta keywords: Meta keywords between <head> tags tell search engines what is contained on the page. When looking for an SEO expert, ensure the Meta description used describes the page honestly and is not longer than 3 sentences and the Meta keywords used detail what is in the content.

3. Gateway and doorway pages: These are fake pages that contain content that is optimized for one or two keywords linking to a landing page and they are used by Black HAT SEO professionals for search engines, not end users. Note that the search engine spiders of major search engines are continually enhanced to detect gateway and doorway pages and they could lead to the flagging of your website for spamming.

4. Link farming: Link farming involves the linking of FFA (free for all) unrelated websites to a website. Not only does this put your website at risk of getting banned, they are also not effective in bringing you targeted web traffic. Google and other major search engines also consider paid links to be Black Hat.

5. Spam comments: Some website owners use spam comments for free backlinks, but note these links are ‘nofollow’ and they do not have any SEO benefits, meaning you will be risking getting banned for nothing. If your business website has a blog, ensure you control the quality of the commenting. This also helps ensure your website does not look unprofessional and neglected.

6. Duplicate content: Avoid copy and paste content on different domains. Search engines only reward unique content. Note that having duplicate content on the same domain is not as serious an offense (at worst it shows neglect and lack of knowledge), but your SEO expert will use canonical tag indicating the original version (and hiding other copies from Google bots).

7. Cloaking: Cloaking is the presentation of different URL or content to users other than search engine spiders. This is deceptive and it violates Google Webmaster Guidelines.

White HAT SEO tactics to Consider

– The use of title tags

– URLs that are SEO-friendly (clean & readable), that use keywords sparingly and that don’t have symbols like @, *, and &.

– The use of Sitemap

– Unique and original content

– Linking your website to social media sites

– Use of text (instead of image) navigation or text links that have footers

– Use of organic links from reputable websites

Author Bio:

Bill Williams is a top SEO expert in New York who uses White HAT SEO tactics such as link building and content creation.

To learn more about SEO, you can follow Bill on his twitter handle.