Whilst there are many important SEO tricks and techniques that you must utilize as a business, such as link building and keyword placement, there are also techniques and tricks you should avoid at all costs. These are known as blackhat SEO techniques.
If you use these techniques in an attempt to improve your SEO, you will undoubtedly receive backlash from search engines and end up negatively impacting your website and rankings.
This article looks at three different blackhat techniques that could ruin your SEO campaign.
Blog & Comment Spam
Gaining blog comments and comments on your website articles is fantastic as it builds traffic and shows user engagement. Artificially creating comments for the purpose of link building, however, can prove hugely detrimental and it is something search engines pick up on.
Some developers have created software that trawls the web and inserts comments into blog posts and articles with a backlink to their website. Alternatively, other developers may simply manually spam comments with backlinks to their sites.
Don’t use either of these techniques. Instead, use blog comments in a professional and refined way to build valuable links.
Link Farming
Link building is a superb method of improving your SEO. In fact, a recent infographic done by seotribunal.com states that a rank-1 website has as much as six times more links than a rank-10 website. This is because, if there are numerous sources on the web that your website is linked to, the search engine will favor your website. This can be taken advantage of, however, in a technique known as link farming.
Link farming is effectively spamming your website to as many sources as possible and creating a huge catalogue of backlinks regardless of the quality or relevance. So, you may have a large number of backlinks but search engines will negatively rank you because the links may have no relevance to your business, or they may come from less than reputable sources.
Keyword Stuffing
Finally, we have keyword stuffing. This is the practice of cramming as many keywords as possible in the content of your website regardless of the context or relevance. This can prove detrimental to your SEO as it looks like spam. Keywords should flow naturally in your text and fit within the context of the sentence and paragraph.
These are just three examples of blackhat SEO techniques and there are many more. Always ensure that you only incorporate whitehat techniques for your SEO for the best results!
