Black Hat SEO in 2016 isn’t Dead. What to Avoid?

Black Hat SEO in 2016

Black Hat SEO in 2016 isn’t Dead. What to Avoid?

16:03 09 January in Search Engine Optimization
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Lots has been written on Black Hat SEO techniques already. So I won’t really talk about it. What we should know in 2016 is that Black Hat SEO isn’t Dead. Unscrupulous SEO companies will lead your website to it putting your business to risk. Black Hat SEO techniques tend to be deceptive and are usually found out by robust SE algorithms. The resultant is a loss in ranking and maybe delisting. If your business solely or even partly depends upon your website, Black hat seo in 2016 can seriously be avoided.

Here is a list of “Don’ts” regarding Black Hat SEO in 2016 that you need to keep in check, if you are aggressive on SEO for your website.

  1. Don’t use guest bloggers to solicit business reviews especially to get that all important inbound link. Genuine blogs farewell for any business but the reverse can be quite damaging.
  2. Buying or selling links – Both of these tactics don’t work and are considered to be a link scam by Google.
  3. Keyword Stuffing – Keywords in meta content may have lost their sheen but some SEO agencies stuff image “Alt” tags with keywords. You got it. This is highly annoying to your visually-impaired visitors and also amounts to keyword spamming. Use alt tags for what the image means than stuffing. This goes for stuffing meta description as well.
  4. Link exchange is passé – Search Engines like Google respect editorial endorsements from natural mentions or “social signals”, but link exchange has lost its meat. You’ll simply waste your time doing this in 2016.
  5. Article Spinning – So you have an original article written and have paid for it. Fair enough. To have it published on your blog and optimise it for the quality content it is works very well. However, if you spin same article (manually or automated) on every second website you can, you’ll get penalized for duplicate content. This goes for rewritten articles with changed titles as well. The damage will be more than the benefit. So be careful.
  6. Abuse of Rich Snippets – Rich snippets are a very powerful tool to garner clicks on a search engine results page. Irrelevant rich snippets can result in a spammy structured markup penalty. When using rich snippets, ensure you choose one that matches the content of your page. For example, you shouldn’t use a recipe snippet if your page doesn’t actually have recipes).
  7. Hidden Text – A very old but frequently used technique. This involves keyword rich text hidden by the same colour as the background of the page to deceive the SEs. This works negative on the keyword density and is easily recognised by search engines. Avoid.
  8. Comment spamming: Comment spamming uses software to post links in comment sections of selected blogs. This can surely generate a large number of backlinks to your website in a short amount of time, potentially increasing your rankings. However, Google is great at identifying and devaluing these types of links.

There is much more to Black Hat SEO in 2016. However, if you monitor your SEO staff or agency for these tactics, be sure to steer clear. The benefits accrued from such deceptive maneuvers will be temporary, however, the penalties will be long lasting. White hat SEO works better.

Focus on generating good quality content  that engages and generates “social signals” rather than using tactics that can be detrimental for your business.

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