The first thing most Utah SEO companies will look to impress upon their customers is the difference between black hat and white hat SEO. Blackhat refers to those techniques that might get results, but are often frowned upon and will likely have the site penalized by search engines. Whitehat techniques are straightforward and often get rewarded by the search engine. Well, this is the simple definition. When it comes to link building, the difference between black hat and whitehat can be very blurry, especially for the beginners. Link building has a huge impact on rankings, but is the one area that has some of the most rampantblackhat techniques. For the beginner, differentiating between the two camps is important, especially considering the frequency with which the major search engines change algorithms today. Here are some of the Blackhat link building techniques users must be wary of;
Paid links
Most of the time, what happens when links are paid for is clear to both the customer and the internet marketing company. Still, it is worth pointing out that even though paid links can sometimes have undeniable advantages for the buyer, they are classified as a serious black hat and can result in penalties. Buying links seems easy and since links are a strong factor in ranking, this can be tempting.
Spamming
Spam comments on websites and blogs are intended to create free backlinks, but they normally end up giving little or no SEO effect. It is still a popular black hat practice, with tools dedicated to automatically distribute spam comments across the internet. Spam comments often come in for those whose blogs are open for comments without any control. These might end up leaving a negative impression for users and lowering the overall user experience. It is better to place controls in place that prevent spam comments, instead of having them ruin the experience for genuine readers and commenters.
Duplication
Search engines prefer original content, and generally frown upon the blatantly copied and pasted content that is found in many websites and blog posts. It is sometimes clear when one finds similar results in the same Google search results page. There are ways to mark the original version of one’s content, such that duplicate versions are not visible to the Google bots. Another technique that is on the black/white line is the article spinning trend, which is getting increasingly popular. It involves pasting the original text into a software or online tool, which then produces several versions paraphrased and marked as unique.
Cloaking
The very core of the search engine’s purpose is to provide meaningful and relevant results to their searches. Cloaking is the use of popular keywords to gain a high ranking for sites or blog pages for queries that are most of the time completely unrelated to the search. Cloaking deceives the search engine, and is a serious violation of Google’s guidelines for webmasters. It also serves people with irrelevant results and can result in a website being penalized.
Guest article written by: Stephanie Clarke is a renowned Utah SEO expert and seasoned writer. She runs an internet marketing blog and a successful SEMcompany in Utah.