For every minute an honest marketer spends to make sure their content doesn’t run afoul of Google’s content guidelines, there should be yet another penalty heaped onto those people purposely attempting to avoid detection. Black Hat SEO tricks that are dishonest and cringeworthy will ruin your readers’ chance to respect you.

I won’t spend more time than it’s worth on the subject, but suffice it to say that if you insist on breaking the laws of content promotion, shame on you. Enough said.

Black Hat SEO tricks and tactics are childlike and a blatant attempt at cheating. Before the rules of White Hat SEO, common sense reigned supreme. Why would anyone try to cheat and win the day with dishonest profits or other ill-gotten gains?

Using the well-known former tactics to increase your content exposure only irritates the search engines and will punish your website, and it will drop so low in the SERPS that it might never recover. It might even be de-indexed. Is doing anything like that worth risking earning yourself a bad reputation and lifelong ban from the search engines?

Tactics used in the Black Hat World are mostly gone now, but there are still instances that remind us they are here. Google and everyone else is wise to every trick out there, but some don’t believe they can get caught – until they do, and it’s not good.

Here are a few tricks the Black Hatters still try to get away with, and even though they’re never successful, they keep trying.

Link Buying
Backlinks earned for your site do wonders for your website’s performance. Notice that I said earned. Earned links don’t come easy, as they shouldn’t. Content, written for people, that honestly and sincerely offers help to answer questions or provide guidance on just about any topic imaginable, is real content.

Many backlinks to your site tell the search engines that people consider your site a trusted authority in your niche, and deserves a high, first-page placement in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

Backlinks are earned and not bought. Google and the others sniff out the bad doers quite quickly now and will punish websites severely for trying to trick them and, ultimately, the consumer. Attempting to buy backlinks instead of earning them could get your site blacklisted, and for a good reason.

Keyword Stuffing
I want to think that today’s Black Hatters moved on to something different that proved they might have learned something after all this time. As it turns out, they haven’t learned anything. They’re still trying to sneak by with keyword stuffing pages of content and upsetting anyone who tries to read the garbage.

Thankfully, search engines are getting smarter as fast as Black Hatters are getting dumber. Most search engines look for latent semantic indexing words (LSI), which aren’t keywords at all, in the content. Now, content gets ranked on relevancy, reputation, social signals, and many other factors, the least of which are keywords exclusively.

Conclusion
The point is, always and forever, create content that pleases your reader. That starts with knowing your audience and their needs, and you learn that with keyword research. What questions are they asking? What solutions work best for them? If your content is a hit with your readers, you’re on the right track.

Proper SEO strategies and link-building is an art to some, and Lemard would enjoy the opportunity to explore how to use the best SEO practices to improve your site’s standing in the search engine results pages. Contact us today.