Black Hat SEO stuff you need to abandon ASAP

Search Engine Optimization: a different universe guiding the Google planet. As long as search engines exist, the dark side of SEO will always be prevalent.

While everyone’s rushing to get that one spot on the first page of the search engine, people are getting hands-on all kinds of techniques, including the unethical ones.

Black hat SEO was super easy and less risky in the previous decade when Google was just boosting the synergy of SERP ranking. But as more and more people started pursuing shortcuts, Google’s got increasingly secured about how to prevent these tricks. From time to time, has developed several algorithms to ensure stricter and better crawling of content on the internet.

To save your precious articles from getting kicked out by Google, here are certain Black Hat tricks you would want to steer clear of:

• Low-quality content- This is judged by ‘Google Panda’ of Google’s algorithm society. Along with the quality check, Panda also evaluates content on the grounds of untrustworthiness, thin or little to no context in an article, duplicate, and article spinning. Remove everything from your site’s content that offends users and put up more things that gain approval.
• Keyword stuffing- A lot and a lot and a lot of people are so badly addicted to this habit of stuffing every keyword that has a high search volume. Just imagine watching a movie with an average plot and songs at an interval of every 10 minutes! Irritating right? No matter how good the tracks are. Google sees a keyword-overstuffed article in the same way. It is generally judged by Google Penguin and pulls down every site that has an over usage of keywords.
• Over optimizing internal links- Off-site SEO is a vital tool to improve the reach and ranking of your site, but that doesn’t mean you will create unnecessary and irrelevant backlinks to boost your site. It might look like a harmless practice initially, but if found out, Google Penguin and Google Payday Loan penalize all those sites referred by irrelevant backlinks.
• Cloaking- It’s the terminology I had learned recently, where people show one piece of article content for Google, and something different appears for the users. This is a sneaky practice and can even lead to the banning of your sites.

I remember one of the statements of John Mueller, sometimes black hat SEO and other risky practices work, and you don’t get caught. But then other times, you might not be so lucky and get caught to realize that ‘not getting caught doesn’t mean it works.’ If you nurture your site organically with all the good practices, Google will reward you with organic reach as well.

What are the other black hat practices one should stay away from?