Once upon a time, placing meta tags and building a few links would have raised the rank of your website, bringing in more visitors. Those days are long gone. The recent Google algorithm updates, known as Panda and Penguin, have brought down the hammer on dishonest search engine optimization (SEO) practices. These techniques are classified and commonly known as ‘black hat’.
Define: Black Hat SEO
SEO is a process meant to help search engines better understand a website so that it is more likely to appear for users using relevant search queries. However, some SEO experts have found cheats and loopholes in search algorithms to promote websites very effectively, but at the cost of search accuracy and user experience.
Search engine companies like Google want to give their users an exceptional search experience, and SEO specialists using best practices can help them in this objective. However, black hat techniques boost one site while making the web less useful for everyone else.
Define: White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO is the use of honest search engine optimization techniques to promote a website in search results. Though there is no universal standard outlining white versus black hat SEO, colloquially, it is well understood. White hat SEO makes every attempt to comply with the standards of major search engines in order to ensure search results including the website they are optimizing are genuine and relevant to users.
Examples of Black Hat Techniques
- Cloaking: Cloaking is an SEO practice in which distinct versions of content are presented for search engine spiders – one visible to users and the other hidden. The objective is to trick search engines into raising the rank of the web page using hidden content that may be irrelevant to users.
- Keyword Stuffing: In order to rank a website for a certain keyword, the keyword is “stuffed” throughout the content even where it makes no sense. Using a keyword in 2 to 3% of words is acceptable and useful, but beyond this limit, search engines will see it as keyword stuffing.
- Article Spinning: Content is king in improving a website’s organic rank, but doing it right by producing lots of good content is time-consuming. Article spinning is an attempt to recycle content to increase its volume, often by using duplicate checkers to avoid penalties. The resulting content is often of very poor quality.
- Private Blog Networks: Private Blog Networks (PBN’s) are networks of several sites set up by the same person or company in order to greatly increase the number of links to and from the target website. They are intended to mimic genuine links from referring domains to increase domain authority and rank.
Examples of White Hat Techniques
- Quality Content: Though what qualifies as good content is subjective, Google algorithms are designed to objectively assess the quality of content on websites. They attempt to find content that seems to be written for the purpose of reading, using clear, correct, and natural language; and promote those websites on which it appears. Quality content is unique, relevant, informative, and intended to be of value to visitors. Publishing content in several forms, including videos, graphics, and slideshows, can also improve the perceived quality of your content.
- Social Media: Social media is a popular medium to share your thoughts and engage your audience with useful content about your website or business. The more likes and shares your content gets, the better the chances that it will be highlighted by search engines, raising your webpage rank.
- Appropriate Keywords: A good SEO specialist will ensure that keywords are appropriate for the site being optimized so that search terms would offer relevant results. Moreover, content should not be written with a singular focus on certain SEO keywords. Instead, keywords should be integrated artfully into the larger piece intended to delight users.
- Be Realistic: While a black hat SEO specialist might be fine starting out with highly competitive keywords intending to game the system; a good white hat strategy begins with medium or low competition keywords that still show decent traffic and for which a website’s rank can be improved effectively and honestly before shifting to more competitive keywords.
The Benefits of Sticking to White Hat SEO
Search engines are very meticulously designed to provide relevant and useful search results to users. We all depend on them to do good work for us and hate it when we cannot find what we’re looking for. For the most part, when search results are showing what we want, it is because SEO specialists and website owners are using honest, white hat promotion techniques.
Black hat techniques do get results. If they didn’t, no one would risk using them. But are they the results you want? A dishonestly high ranking for a website means visitors are more likely to go to a website that is not what they are looking for. This means the bounce rate will tend to be high and the conversion rate will tend to be low. Overall, the high rank is pretty much pointless.
Moreover, the use of black hat techniques is more likely than ever to be detected by major search engines, resulting in penalties or even being de-indexed from search results altogether. SEO agencies have even been sued (http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2014/05/advertiser-may-have-claims-against-seo-firm-using-undisclosed-spammy-practices.htm) for using dishonest practices on their clients’ sites, incurring a Google penalty. Unless you really think you can outsmart Google, always stick to white hat techniques and ensure the SEO agency you hire intends to comply with best practices.