Does Black hat SEO is Still Helpful or Dangerous?

Digital marketing is all about optimizing your site for search engines and boost online presence over the various digital platforms like social media channels, blog sites and much more. Everyone wants to be listed on the top rankings fast as top rankings help drive more traffic, sales and customers.

The three main approaches digital marketers use to get your webpage listed in top rankings including:

• White Hat SEO

• Grey Hat SEO

• Black Hat SEO

White Hat SEO:

In SEO terminology, this is the use of White SEO techniques and right strategies that does focus on audience rather than focusing on search engines. These tactics usually obey guidelines of search engines. White hat SEO techniques or ethical ways get you to the top ranks but it may take time. This is the right way.

Most of the search engines are designed to offer the accurate and updated information to the users or human readers. Whenever user searches any query via search engines, search engine programs (bots or spiders) hunt for the link to search the information users want. These spiders search the content and list the relevant information for the users.

White Hat SEO techniques are designed to work as per the Google’s guideline and include some techniques like keyword analysis, keywords, quality back linking, writing good content for readers and much more.

This is also known as ethical SEO and intends to make a long term investment on any business site.

Grey hat SEO

These are the SEO techniques that may be combination of both white and black hat SEO, this is something like using white hat SEO techniques to the level where it becomes black hat approaches. This sentence may leave you confused by let us make it clear. This is the tricky methods to manipulate search engines to get higher position in listings. People use grey hat SEO techniques to market their website with less risk.

e.g: Using link building white hat SEO technique and ends up with creating lots of links that is known as link spamming (Black Hat SEO technique).

These techniques are riskier as after some time you will caught by the search engines and get penalized so avoid it.

Black Hat SEO:

Black hat SEO techniques are designed to trick bots. This technique is used to break the rules of search engines and get the higher search rankings within short span of time. This technique is not good for long term results.

Black hat SEO practices are useful only for the people who want fast results and long term results and penalties don’t matter to them. But if you are a genuine online marketer and want an established domain, site and business, then you should avoid these practices as they may be dangerous for you. Search engines can find these sites easily with the help of algorithms update so be very careful and use only white hat SEO technique.

Some black hat SEO techniques include:

• Hidden text to fool crawlers

• Hidden links

• Keyword stuffing

• Duplicate pages

• Scraped content

• Low quality content

• Clocking

• Doorway pages

• Link exchange

• Link farming or low quality backlinks

Search engines have become smarter and now the websites which use black hat SEO practices get caught and penalized by search engines. This penalty may be in the form of dropped ranking or banned sites. Search engines keep updated their algorithms to find out such sites and catch the deceptive ones. You should avoid using these misleading practices to get long term result.

These black hat SEO techniques are good for affiliate marketers and ad publishers:

These strategies are to boost sudden boost in search engine ranking and bring required short term results fast.

Affiliate marketers and ad publisher use such techniques to get sudden boost in ranking and make profit in short span of time. When the ranking falls down and site get banned in major search engines they throw away the site and domain and buy new domain and start using practices to boost ranking of new domain and site.

These sites always try to be stay ahead of the search engines algorithm updates as they want fast results and they are no longer worried about the penalty or long term results so such industries may find it useful in future as well. But Google algorithm is becoming more precise, so deceptive tricks will be fruitful or not for such industries is not confirmed.

Some industries competitive than others and use spam techniques to boost traffic and rank:

Some industries like online casino, mortgage loans, adult entertainment, prescription medicine and much more use black SEO or aggressive marketing techniques. These particular industries use these techniques. Search engines have no choice other than including these industries in the search results.

Some industries which are less competitive and in the same business and using same black hat SEO practices, they may get the listed as search engines have to show something relevant to the users.

Search engines have different algorithms in each country so these black hat SEO techniques don’t work anywhere. Search engines have already started recognizing these activities and working over it.

Avoid using Black hat SEO techniques for SEO clients:

It means the people who want sudden ranking boost and don’t have any concern about long term result, they use these techniques and yes, these tactics are useful for them but you can’t do it with your SEO clients who have their well settled business and want to boost their ranking in major search engines via obeying the guidelines of these search engines.

If you want to remain in search results or maintain top rankings for long run, the black hat SEO techniques are not for you, Period!

Wrapping it up:

SEO is the genuine process to bring long term result for your business website and you should always go for White hat SEO techniques. Black hat and Grey hat SEO techniques should be avoided.

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