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There are a number of less-than reputable ways to "optimize" your website for search engines, but such black hat SEO techniques (the moniker borrowed from hacker lingo) leave your website exposed to penalties and unprotected in the event of algorithmic changes.
Among a plethora of information on how to build traffic to your website and what methods to use, there is a single point of consensus that is consistent across all sources: black hat SEO techniques should be avoided.
Below are 4 methods of this ilk that you should steer clear of. Practicing any of these with regularity will kill your search engine rankings and make it near impossible to re-establishreestablish your website. While these methods may appear effective in the short-term, you'll regret the long-term (and long-lasting) negative impact that they will have on your website.
1. Anchor Text Link Building Strategies
Not too long ago, using a keyword as anchor text was a completely legitimate - not to mention easy - way of getting yourself to rank higher based on that keyword.
With the introduction of Google's Penguin update in May, this tactic became inadvisable. This is flagged as a blatant attempt to manipulate search engine rankings, which search engines are adamantly opposed to. Now, a high percentage of exact match anchor text links can results in a Penguin penalty, and they are notoriously difficult to recover from.
- See also: Penguin VS. Unnatural Link Warnings
2. Low Quality Link Building
Inbound links from low quality pages can actually serve to devalue your website, ultimately impacting you negatively.
Tons of ads, thin or poor quality content, and lots of content but low traffic may indicate that a particular website is not a good backlink opportunity.
Furthermore, this practice falls under Google's definition of a link scheme, and when used in excess, it can hurt your website.
3. Article Syndication
Article syndication was a common SEO practice up until fairly recently. It took care of the quantity part of link building, but ignored the quality part.
Essentially, it's the practice of taking one piece of content and spinning it off to distribute on a multitude of different websites. And even today, it might work for the short term.
However, making up poor quality articles and passing them off as valuable content that should be read or linked to is not good for long term SEO. When it's detected, your website will suffer for it.
4. Duplicate Content
Avoiding duplicate content is a well-known SEO best practice, yet people still copy and spin content in order to hit valued keywords as many times as possible over as many avenues as they can.
The problem with this is that search engine algorithms can detect duplicated content with relative ease, and when they do, websites employing this method suffer the consequences.
The key is to produce original, unique content that is likely to be used, cited and shared, which indicates to search engines that it is valuable and relevant.
Conclusion
Any informed discussion on how to build traffic to your website will stress one simple truth - black hat SEO techniques are not the way to do it. If you roll the dice and employ any of the above tactics, you will likely be penalized, and your website will disappear from SERPs completely. So despite the visible short-term rewards these methods may produce, ultimately, their use will end up hurting your website in the long run.
Hi Daniel,
Google has worked very hard to deal with black hat SEO technique. So its suicidal to now use any black hat technique in hope to get higher ranking.
I recently went to a creative writing conference and it’s funny to me how the simple advice of “create quality, unique content” universally applies to what it takes to achieve success. We go to all these panels hoping for some surefire way to win publishers and readers, but any and all advice is simply useless unless the content you’re creating is actually worth anything.
There is no real, lasting shortcut that will make any difference on your path to success unless you’re will to be in the effort to earn it.
Hey Bekah,
Very true. People often forget that search engines rank on relevancy and utility. If you create content that people find relevant and useful in relation to what they’re searching (effectively answering the questions they have), you’ll begin to see better results.
Dan
Hey Daniel,
Great post. I think it’s important to remind people to avoid black hat techniques. These sort of strategies don’t result in any long term value and on the flip side can do significant damage to a site’s rankings. If you focus on creating quality content that adds value to your niche, everything else should fall into place. Anyway, I thought this would be useful for our blog readers, so I included your post in my roundup of February’s best social media, SEO, and content marketing articles. http://www.northcutt.com/blog/2014/03/february-round-up-best-seo-social-media-and-content-marketing/ Nice job.
Ben
Thanks Ben! That’s great news. Adding value for users is adding value for search engines; the two should both be built into a unified content strategy.
Dan