How Black Hat SEO Can Kill Your Business

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that manipulates website characteristics and incoming links to help improve a site’s ranking in a search engine. There are many tools and techniques used in the optimization process, such as Black Hat and White Hat.

What is Black Hat SEO?

This is a concern that a lot of website owners can have. Black Hat SEO, in its broadest sense, refers to strategies that contravene Google recommendations and accepted industry standards. Search engine ranking manipulation, cloaking, link spamming, and doorway pages are just a few examples of black hat tactics. White Hat SEO, on the other hand, is the exact opposite, as the name implies. White Hat methods adhere to Google standards and are primarily concerned with providing high-quality content. However, many business owners believe they must work with a Black Hat SEO firm since White Hat SEO firms frequently charge exorbitant rates and break their promises.

If your site uses Black Hat SEO, here’s how it can damage your business:

GOOGLE PENALTY

Google takes its ranking formula seriously and works hard to give users the greatest search experiences possible. Google's Webmaster Guidelines can be readily broken by using Spider Bots to penalize pages or websites. Spider Bots use the internet to browse websites while "crawling" for data, which they then send to Google's servers. These spiders periodically examine the websites in Google's index for fresh content and links to pages they have never before checked. If these spiders discover a problem with your website, Google may penalize you by downranking your website or removing it totally from the search engine's index.

MALICIOUS CYBER ATTACKS

Have you ever heard of the tale of a Black Hat company putting concealed content onto websites? It was subsequently discovered that this Black Hat company was actually a bunch of hackers who had attacked over 3,000 websites. These cybercriminals were able to breach databases while posing as a reliable SEO optimizers, introducing extra content through random pages on their victim's websites. Black Hat SEOs frequently employ this method to raise their search engine ranks while also giving them access to infected websites to propagate malware on.

GREED

When you use Black Hat SEO, you no longer produce relevant material that fits your buyer persona. In other words, you no longer think about your customers. Yes, this method will help you generate more traffic, but will most likely attract the wrong visitors with little to no relevance. Your greed to rank higher on a search engine will only make your website become irrelevant with unattractive content. Which will only make your business appear dishonest to its users and competition.

Search engine optimization is more than the appropriate use of titles and metadata, but is more about producing genuine, high quality content that provides true value. If you’re looking for ways to build website optimization and improve its SEO ranking, here’s how:

CREATING HIGH QUALITY CONTENT

A great way to deliver high-quality and relevant content is to build inbound links with high-authority websites and social media pages. Link building can improve your SEO rankings depending on the type of link being used. Internal links and external links deliver different benefits. Internal links work best if you are wanting to increase engagement or lower bounce rates, whereas external links increase website traffic and are far more beneficial to your ranking. The placement of your links influences Google’s algorithm, as Google values the first backlinks more than the last one. Choose helpful links, over harmful ones.

KEYWORDS

A keyword search can be used to enhance user experience. It's crucial to pick keywords that are specifically related to your target market. Starting points include improving your page names and adding keywords to the meta description. Subheadings are another technique that could be used to aid readers in determining how pertinent the content is to their needs. This gives you the chance to have a portion of your website page appear as a snippet or response box on Google's ranking sites.

IMPROVING WEBSITE DOMAIN

To name a few ranking factors, your domain can have an impact on SEO. Factors like slow loading time, or even the domain’s name and address, can hurt your website’s ranking. Choosing the right domain name and address significantly impacts your SEO score, but it is important to keep in mind that your search engine ranking also depends on the quality of your content and web design.

While it is true that some websites may run well using Black Hat SEO, quality content will always win. Website owners who choose to use Black Hat techniques are only looking for a shortcut solution that will only benefit them in the short run but damage them in the long run.

Fast-tracking your search engine ranking comes with a cost and there are better ways to get to the top.