In our last blog Black Hat SEO Techniques You Should Look Out For – Part I, we have discussed only two techniques of black hat SEO – paid links and keyword stuffing. Here we will discuss some more black hat SEO techniques. Have a look at these techniques and find out whether any of these techniques have been used in your website to rank it high in the search engines.
Hidden Links
Although hidden links are not much seen nowadays, you may still find them. They are what they actually sound like. These are links, which the user is typically unable to see. However, the search engine spiders consider them while determining the ranking of a website. Google’s Webmaster guidelines outlaws putting texts behind any image, using a white background with a white text, text with zero font size, off-screen links and linking even a small part of the text. To find out whether there are hidden links, you don’t need to go to the backend of a website and see each and every page individually, instead, you can use an SEO tool for analysing the entire link profile. With this, you will be able to get a complete list of the website’s links including the hidden links.
Cloaking
Cloaking is an SEO technique where content that has been presented to a search engine spider is different from that of a user’s browser. Cloaking is illegal and is a black hat SEO technique. Google can permanently ban any side author or site from the index if it finds that the website has been engaged in the cloaking process.
Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
PBNs are a way of building backlinks through a series of blogs. These private blog networks can be used either to build domain authority for one another through a web or increase the ranking of a central site. Google works hard to penalise these PBNs. They look for a network of blogs that have the same IP addresses, same owners, shared servers and identical or similar content. When they detect such PBNs, they penalise the website for practising such techniques. This kind of black hat SEO is easily identified by Google.
With black hat SEO techniques being used there is a high chance for your website to be penalised by Google. So, ensure your site is optimised with white hat SEO strategies. For this to happen you should hire a reputed optimisation firm to build a booming online presence and always stay away from companies that use unethical optimisation techniques. You should go for companies that follow Google’s rules and creates crisp and informative content.