Reasons why you should Stop Implementing These SEO Tactics for your Website

It is every website owner’s dream to rank high in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). However, it shouldn’t be by any means possible. As much as ranking better is a good thing, we shouldn’t use unfair SEO tactics to get on top. Like in any competition, some will follow the rules and those who break them. In the online world, those who use Best SEO Services are called white hats, while those who don’t are called black hats.

If you choose to follow the white hat technique to implement your SEO efforts, you will be doing the right thing. However, these methods are usually slow and won’t give you immediate results as much as they are safe. But, if you go with the black hat technique, you will get instant results in a short while, and the risk will be high.

White Hat SEO – One of the best SEO tactics skills is implemented using the best ethics that align with the Google ranking guidelines. Some of these techniques include guest posting, keyword research, Meta tag optimization, internal linking, and a few others.

Black Hat SEO – This method contradicts the white hat technique, as it doesn’t follow ethical standings, and ignores Google’s ranking guidelines. It involves uncouth ways that may hurt competitors to achieve top rankings. This comes with a lot of risks in that; you may get penalized by Google if crawlers discover that your website is using black hat SEO Strategies to rank high.
There are instances that you may use black hats without the knowledge that they are black hats. In this case, Google will give you several notifications about de-indexing your website, or you may experience a sudden fall in the rankings. If this happens, you should not waste time, perform an SEO audit to find out which black hat techniques are giving you problems.
In this post, I have outlined the various black hat techniques and why you shouldn’t use them in your SEO technique to rank better. And with no further delay, let’s get into them.

1. Cloaking

This sneaky technique is used to trick the search engines and users. It does this by setting up two sets of information to be delivered: one is sent to the user and the other to search engine crawlers. A good example is when searching for available hotels found in your location, and when you click the images you are directed to some spammy website that deals with movies and music downloads. Generally, search engines will not index the cloaked site. However, there are instances where they get indexed by mistake. If Google locates, you are using a cloaked webpage; it will not hesitate to penalize you. In case you didn’t know, this technique is a 100% black hat. However, there are instances where they can are overlooked but only the light version of it.

2. Keyword Stuffing

I am not disputing the fact that keywords are important, however, many webmasters tend to misuse these keywords, placing them anywhere in the content even when they don’t make sense. This is called keyword stuffing, and it is done to help them achieve high rankings fast. If you are using this method, it will eventually backfire and will get penalized by Google. Google cares so much about customer experience and will not let anyone get away with it if they are caught. Keyword stuffing harms readability and context, and a visitor may not understand what you are talking about.

3. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to copying content from other sites and posting it on yours. This is one black hat that is hard to get away with since Google can identify it quickly. If the web crawlers find out that a website is continuously posting copied content, they will immediately de-index it. Additionally, there are many tools available in the market that can help you know whether the content was copied from another website, and you can use these tools to check whether you are using copied content, or check whether someone has copied your content. To make it even simple, some of these plagiarism checkers will show you the source of the copied content.

4. Doorway and Gateway Pages

Doorway and gateway pages refer to content that doesn’t offer the user any value. Such a website is filled with low-quality content with numerous keywords and CTAs. When these websites are clicked, they often lead the user to different landing pages, making them sort of modified redirects. This doesn’t signify that these websites are not visible on search engines. They are very visible, and sometimes they get indexed accidentally. Google will not identify these websites easily, but once it does, it immediately de-indexes them or penalizes them heavily. If you are using these pages, I suggest that you pull them down immediately before Google penalizes you or gives you the death penalty.

5. Clickbait

It is a common trend nowadays for websites clickbait titles to get more clicks and drive more traffic to their domain to get high ranks. This is what is known as clickbait. What clickbait titles and thumbnails do is create curiosity to the user so that they immediately click to see where they are led. They will, however, exit the site immediately, when they find out that the site has no relations with the provided information. This may lead to less dwell time and an increased bounce rate, which are harmful to the webmaster. If you are planning to use clickbait, make sure that they are not fake and will lead the user to the information they are looking for.

Conclusion

You know what they say about shortcuts, they are always dangerous. This perfectly describes black hat techniques. They will only work for a short while, and you will eventually get caught up with Google and end up getting penalized or in the worst-case scenario, get de-indexed. You should, therefore, abandon these techniques and stick to the white hat techniques for slow but safe SEO tactics that won’t lead to problems.