Getting a website to position on the first page of Google results is neither easy nor fast. But in a world as competitive as today’s, many companies do not want to wait to see results and want to reach the top of the search engine ranking as soon as possible, which leads them to use not too ethical techniques such as Black Hat SEO, a type of SEO that pushes the limits and that can have dire consequences.
What is Black Hat SEO
This name refers to a set of techniques used to achieve search engine positioning as quickly as possible and bypassing Google’s guidelines for what would be “a good job” of SEO.
That is, what you are looking for is to deceive the search engine and that it gives a website a position in its ranking that it really does not deserve.
Although it is a technique that can be effective in the short term, the truth is that Google is increasingly attentive to this type of thing, and if it detects that Black Hat SEO has occurred, it does not hesitate to apply harsh penalties, as we will see later.
Some Black Hat Techniques
Cloaking
Good SEO implies that the page is considered useful by both users and by Google itself, and what this technique seeks is to make the search engine believe that a website is optimized and will be useful for users when, in reality, it is not.
What is done in cloaking is to get Google to believe that a page is optimized for a certain keyword when in reality it is not. In this way, the search engine positions it well. However, what the search engine robots see and what users see are different pages.
This technique has been used a lot in recent years, but today Google has the right tools to quickly detect that it is being cheated.
Spinning Items
Creating a good article to achieve organic positioning is not easy. It involves a good investment of time and effort and, in most cases, hiring a specialist to be in charge of its preparation.
Since a single text is not enough to convince Google that a website is good, there are those who decide to resort to spinning articles. This technique consists of taking a text and creating new content from it, making only a few small modifications.
There is even software that is responsible for doing this work, which implies that a single text can get a lot out of it. However, Google is also capable of detecting this content. Which, although not copied, is very similar to another that already exists, and penalizes it.
Link SPAM
With this technique what is sought is to ensure that there is a large number of links pointing to the web that you want to position to get it to rank better in search engines.
The problem is that those links are not natural. What is usually done is to create a website of fake blogs and websites (often buying websites that have been abandoned) and put links. The problem here is that Google detects that, in most cases. The links come from pages that have nothing to do with the theme of the web that is being positioned.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO is a Black Hat SEO technique that involves acting on a third party’s website. It is a kind of sabotage that seeks to improve the positioning of a page by interfering with the website of a third party. For example, by putting links to it on websites of dubious reputation.
The Risks of Black Hat SEO
Google does not like Black Hat SEO at all, so it sanctions it harshly. If it detects that a website is carrying out it, it will penalize it with the loss of positions in the results ranking and, in the most serious cases, it could imply that the website directly disappeared from the results page.
Black Hat vs. Whitehat
The Black Hat SEO can give good results in the short term, but in the end, both users and Google detect that it is not a quality website. So the time invested in doing this bad positioning ends up being useless. And to this, we must add that if the search engine notices it, it will apply a penalty.
White Hat SEO involves doing the positioning right. The results take longer to see, but in return, they are much more stable. These are the techniques that we use in SEOestudios when we start an SEO positioning strategy. Do you want more information? Ask us!
