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Semalt: How To Recognize Black Hat SEO Tactics

Black hat SEO is a set of practices that we use to improve the ranking of a website in search engines. It violates the terms and conditions of Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Instead, white hat SEO is a safe process and helps you have more credibility on the internet.

This term was originated in Hollywood films to differentiate between a good person and a bad guy. The bad characters used to wear black hats, while the good people used to wear white hats.

Michael Brown, a leading specialist from Semalt, assures that most recently, black hat SEO has become a major problem for the webmasters. It is commonly used by the computer hackers and spammers. Through this process, they create problems for website owners, hijack your devices and perform unethical actions online and offline.

It's important to understand that implementing the black hat SEO techniques and strategies might get your website banned from the search engine results. That is why you should get only high-quality traffic and pay attention to white hat SEO strategies only.

Introduction to Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO is a technique that has been disapproved by the search engines and is still used by plenty of webmasters to improve their sites' rank. These practices are not par the terms and conditions of Google, Yahoo, and Bing and cannot guarantee desired results for a lifetime. A lot of tips and ideas have been presented to prevent webmasters from using black hat SEO. You should check Google's Webmaster Guidelines, Bing's Webmaster Guidelines, and Yahoo's Webmaster Guidelines to have an idea of what is black hat SEO and how to get rid of it. You should avoid paid search engine practices to ensure your site's safety online.

How to recognize black hat SEO tactics?

The most common SEO practices that can be used to identify your SEO practices are duplicate content, article automation, doorway pages, hidden links and anchor text, stuffing of keywords, negative SEO, reporting your competitors without any reasons, sneaking redirect, cloaking, link scheme, unwise guest posting, and link manipulation. Also, you should not spine your articles, do not opt for link networks, link wheels, and link farms, and avoid snippet markup spamming to a great extent. It has been revealed that spamming of comments, an automated query to Google, creating subdomains randomly, and creating pages with suspicious behavior is forbidden by the search engines. You should not get involved in activities like viruses, phishing, malware, and Trojans because all these are a part of black hat SEO.

Reporting black hat SEO

If you are involved in this activity, you will never get the desired results. And if you see someone else is involved in black hat SEO, you may want to report it. If you don't report, your website might get attacked through malicious hacks, negative SEO campaigns, and spamming links. Thus, it is important to report to Google to ensure your site's credibility on the internet.

Should you avoid black hat SEO?

It's true that black hat SEO gets your site good rank in the search engine results, but this is an illegal practice and can get your site banned for a lifetime. There will be a short-term success when your traffic is increased, but Google applies a lot of penalties to such websites, and it may not be possible for you face its devastating effects. It means black hat SEO techniques are not right for you if you are serious about running a business for a lifetime.