These Black Hat practices might earn you manual penalty

In recent past, it has been noted that a lot of big companies have suffered penalty by Google. The possible reason behind it can be the real time effect of new and updated Google Penguin. All those websites who have been following some Black Hat practices have undergone through some strict actions by Google. Now, this may be the lack of SEO knowledge or it can either be intentional actions of those sites to gain good ranks in search results. Moreover, in some cases consulting errant SEO vendors can also lead to manual penalty because these SEO providers use Black Hat SEO techniques to show good results to the their clients. Therefore, it becomes important to stay aware of such Black Hat SEO practices which might gain us penalties. Before learning about what not to do, let us first have a look about what Black Hat SEO is?

Black Hat SEO can be considered as the negative SEO which covers the aspect of using false and unfair means to gain top position in search results. It is the use of such techniques which tricks the search engine during the rankings of different pages. However, all the top SEO companies strictly avoid the use of such practices because they do not want to loose the client’s trust by using such tricks. But still there are many business owners who are unaware about the adverse effects of Black Hat SEO and constantly fall into the trap of such mistakes due to their lack of knowledge. So, to make it very clear we have listed all the black hat practices which should be avoided.

Avoid the following :

• Automatically Generated Content: Any content generated by the software is not useful for the reader because that software generated content will have an unnatural and different type of language. Such type of content will not excite the user, and he/she will bounce off quickly this will reduce the CTR(click-through-ratio). So, even before any warning is issued the page rank will go down and that is why such content should be avoided.

• Cloaking and useless redirects: Cloaking means showing different information to the visitor then what he sees in the search results. It casts a negative impression on the user because the purpose for which he choose to visit your website was not solved rather it might waste their time. Moreover, if you use irrelevant directs on your page it will also be accounted as Black Hat SEO. So, before adding redirects to your page make sure they are redirecting the user to correct page otherwise you can suffer from a penalty.

• Doorway Pages: These are the spammed web pages which are designed to trick the search engine by giving same information on each one. This is done to increase the result search for a high valued phrase and then sending the users to the same page again and again. The doorway pages once caught by Google are then blocked at once.

• Hidden Texts and Links: Hiding Texts and Links is another Black Hat SEO technique. Text can be hidden by using white background or by screening off the text from CSS styles, this can be done to hide keywords or highly values phrases. Also links can also be hidden in images or in a single character as small as a full stop. Hiding links and text can cause a ban on the page or on the whole concerned site.

• Keyword Stuffing: Keyword Stuffing means adding to much Keywords in the content. The use of keywords must be done appropriately in our content, although the value of using keywords have reduced a bit but they still remain an important aspect in enhancing the quality of the content. One should make sure that the keyword is at least present in the “Title Tag” and the “Meta Description”. Moreover, if too much keywords are used then it may raise a red flag for your content.

• Link Schemes: These are the offers or schemes which promise you too sell or buy links in exchange of money. However, the exchange of money for links is not the only way it is being traded rather the deal can be of any type. These paid links are negative SEO technique as buying or selling links to increase the traffic is against the guidelines of Google. So, strict actions are taken against those who have been following this practise.

• Scrapping: Scrapping means the use of already written content without the permission of one who holds the copyright of that content. If you do scrapping Google will show you very low in its search results or you might not get any place at all.

  
  

• Unnatural Link Promotion: Unlike Link schemes, this is another type of link trade in which one site promises to show the links of other one and vice versa. This kind of trades are really harmful as  they reduce the relevancy of the problem searched by the user and hence decreases the success rate. This is easily noticeable because users start reporting for the problems that they face , visiting such websites.

• User Generated Content: The comment section of your site can serve ab a huge source of spamming . The users can add irrelevant links and text to divert traffic to their sites. So, we should always remember to put a Nofollow for the that section of the site. Moreover, you should clean your comment box regularly to remove any kind of spams and false information which might decrease the worth of your site.