Link Building back in the day

Back in the day the world of New York SEO companies was similar to the Wild West. Formerly, link building a longtime factor in the ranking of a website used to be regarded as a process that could be very easily manipulated. All optimization experts had to do in order to achieve results is to tend to lots of ghost or spammy websites (aka. link farming) which were all prepared to be collectively linked to any new clients’ websites they were working for. This looked to be a great strategy simply because it worked for a pretty long time. Then search engine management realized this method will only do wrong with the search results and therefore started to take the steps to cut down on this methodology.

Google still needed a good 10-15 years to catch up and start to chop down these good-for-nothing websites and ghost directories. Let me also underline the fact that despite what anyone says, the old methods are still lurking around and many people actually fall for them. Today, link farming is one trademark sign of Black SEO tactics alongside other non-approved networking methods which I will be talking about later on.

What is Black Hat and why we use the term?

Today, everything that goes against the guidelines of search engines ( and often the laws) has been coined as „Black Hat” meaning techniques that were founded to penetrate search engines crawlers into them thinking the website has a high value to rank well, while in the meantime the content of that website is not worthy of even being mentioned.

Link building strategies which used to be cool but now they are considered Black Hat SEO:

Farming aka. Web ring: a smaller or larger circle of interconnecting websites which use the same codes and can be quickly optimized to any keyword content. Each one of these websites are quite meaningless, often masked as a directory they are link famers with links that don’t really lead anywhere except to other spammy sites.

Link chaining: very similar to link farming but connecting directly with only a single website, creating a rather chain-like structure which makes crawlers not realize direct connections with the websites.

Cloaking:  having different uber-optimized content for search engines, while representing a very different content to the viewers.

Hidden link injection: this is an old one. Injecting web links to any websites which are not self-owned this way doing a make-believe with the crawlers for them to think there is an actual link.

Buying up old websites which are expired, optimizing them and giving them just enough content to pass then use them as satellite sites to the original website.

These techniques are alive and well, they are still being used by many who were left in the time –warp or simply who are paid lots of money to make a website famous for 2 weeks. However if you want to avoid penalties and having your site completely devalued, turn to a legit white hat New York SEO companies who act according to the guidelines ensuring your business’ web-content is in safe hands.