6 Black Hat SEO Techniques That Kills Your Google Ranking

If you own a website, you know how important it is to rank highly on Google. Getting a top listing comes with enormous benefits. It is one of the ways to attract organic traffic to your site. This is why you will find many individuals working extra hard to outrank their competitors by using tools such as Google SEO checker. This helps to know if you are ranking well or not.

Sadly, some individuals do not want to put in the effort to see their sites rise steadily to the top. They want to take shortcuts going against search engine guidelines to achieve the results they desire. Never fall victim to this because the unethical tactics are also known as black hat SEO techniques always end up doing more harm than good. To know some of the methods to avoid when seeking to rank your site higher, here are 6 black hat SEO techniques that will be the death of your Google ranking.

• Paid Links

While link building is one of the sure ways to develop an authority site, using paid links will soon land you in hot soup. Most of the time you will end up with low-quality, irrelevant and spammy links from links farms. Google is in the habit of penalizing heavily anyone who uses these link schemes. Rather than get in trouble with the search engine, you would rather spend time sourcing relevant high-quality links that will boost your site in the proper way.

• Keyword Stuffing

In the past, it was easy to get away with stuffing your pages with keywords to rank higher. It is not the case anymore because Google began to recognize and penalize keyword-stuffed pages since 2012. Rather than having the same keyword on each sentence of your content, sprinkle this well in a way that makes sense. You can also use LSI keywords which are phrases that have the same meaning as your keyword to avoid triggering alerts.

• Using Spun Content

Google values well-written, original, and relevant content. It highly frowns upon people who try to be clever by changing up a few sentences of content that already exists on other sites. Always get into the habit of coming up with premium content for your site to avoid penalties instead of stealing from others. Remember Google seeks to offer people the best information when conducting online searches.  

• Cloaking

This is where you present one version of a page to Google and another to your visitors. It is very frustrating for users because you are basically deceiving them, and not giving them what they want. Google has bots to scan your site and authenticate the details you present. When they catch up with you, trust that you will face the dire consequences.

• Bait and Switch

This is where you patiently wait for a page to be indexed and ultimately start ranking before you replace it with a different one. This is something that can only work for a while because it means that Google will be ranking irrelevant content. The giant search engine will eventually notice this. You will end up suffering because the bounce rate will be over the moon meaning the perks of the technique are not only minimal, but they are short-lived.

• Comment Spamming

Having comments on your page is one of the ways to increase interactions between users. Some website owners believe that the only way to get this is by using special software to get as many links as possible on the site. Google has a means of identifying and devaluing these types of comments; thus, you will only be wasting your time engaging in such. Avoid such time of blog commenting just for the sake of backlinks.

Wrapping Up

Even if black hat SEO techniques initially give you speedy results, do not be tempted to use them ever. Search engines go the extra mile to hunt down these sneaky unscrupulous methods with no remorse. This simply means that you will only make things worse at the end of the day.