Why Search Engines Frown on Black Hat SEO Marketing Techniques

Why Search Engines Frown on Black Hat SEO Marketing Techniques

To understand why search engines frown on Black Hat SEO marketing techniques, first you have to know exactly what they are. In general terms, black hat marketing is trying to hoodwink the search engines into placing your website high in their rankings so it will appear on the first page of the results for a given keyword.

There are many ways you can do this, but be warned; if the search engines catch onto it, your website could become history and you will lose any benefit you may have achieved with those extra customers or higher ranking.

Basically, search engines are in the business of helping people find what they want. If they don’t do this well, people will not want to use them. Black hat methods of marketing often lead searchers to websites that are spammy or that offer something they are not interested in – or to a website that does not give them the value that they could and should have found. They tend to blame the search engines rather than the website owner.

Black hat marketing techniques include: –

  • Using purchased links or link farms to get links to increase their traffic
  • Keyword stuffing – overuse of keywords
  • Invisible text such as white text on a white background can be picked up by Google bots
  • Doorway pages
  • Adding keywords unrelated to text – slightly different from keyword stuffing
  • Changing the contents of a page completely after it has been ranked
  • Cloaking – the practice of hijacking a link to take clickers to a page different from what they expected.
  • Duplicate content – using the exact content another website has used.

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