Black hat SEO is an unethical practice that helps a website to rank high in Google. A lot of times, a website won’t even know that it is actually suffering from a black hat SEO tactic and being penalized by Google for it. Although it is a technique that can help a website rank high in Google for a temporary period, the search engines will eventually demote it as a penalty for the bad practice. Want to know how to identify some black hat SEO strategies? Here are a few signs that you should look for in your site to know whether your SEO expert has actually used black hat SEO techniques to rank your website high in a search engine.
Paid Links
Link popularity is a way that Google uses to rank websites. The more sites that link to yours & the better the domain authority of those sites, the more authoritative Google would think you to be. As per Google, a paid link is a kind of link you bring with money or any kind of good. All leading search engines devote its resources to shutting down of the link farms & paid links. However, you do not need any SEO tool for determining if the website is purchasing links. You first need to look at the anchor text. If the text is random without having any connection with the link, it may be bought. Then, have a look at the number of links that are on a web page. If the page has full of random linked texts, they are then paid links. However, if you want you can use SEO tools that are used to spot paid links.
Keyword Stuffing
This happens when a keyword appears on a website an inordinate number of times to have it rank high in Google. Keyword stuffing is said to be one of the most popular black hat SEO strategies. It may be hard to recognize because Google very often changes its definition of the percentage of text that must incorporate your key phrase or keyword. So, the best way of identifying keyword stuffing is to search in places such as meta description, title & introduction. You can also know that a keyword or key phrase has been stuffed if you see them unnaturally phrased or used out of context in a website.
There are many other black hat SEO techniques that can hurt your business and your rankings. You should know how to spot them as well. Look for those signs in our next blog. Till then stay tuned to our blog space!