Black Hat SEO – You won’t believe the truth
This is not going to be your run of the mill article about how Black Hat SEO is bad and it does not work anyway. The fact of the matter is that Black Hat techniques are widely used in the industry.
Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO
First we need to define what we mean by Black Hat vs White Hat. And talking about ‘ethics’, since there are no laws regarding use of these techniques, I’m not a fan of calling them unethical.
Black Hat SEO refers to the use of techniques to manipulate search engine rankings, often in direct violation of search engine guidelines. Kind of like gaming the system.
White Hat SEO, on the other hand, involves following search engine guidelines, and hoping for the best.
In fact SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – the results are what matters, not how you get there. With such high competition for peoples attention, the internet is mostly just a way for companies to make money. Be it increasing brand awareness or driving traffic to make a sale.
Ethical Dilemma?
Now, I don’t say you should use Black Hat techniques, as someone who is not technical enough could easily have it backfire on them. But, if you are willing to put in the time and effort, it is a viable strategy.
Google uses an algorithm to determine how your website stacks up against the competition, and whose results are shown first to a person googling a word or collection of words. The whole system is designed to try and give the most relevant content to the end user, while monetizing the whole system by selling keywords. So, think about that. Google sells keywords, and if you buy them you get a higher rank. So, not sure if Google is really ethical enough to worry about providing the most relevant content to the user if they basically have put in a back door to allow those with the biggest pockets to circumvent their algorithm.
Scope
There are over 2 billion websites, and there are estimates that only 20% of them appear in Google Search results. Google’s goal is not to index every web site and page in the world, as there are literally trillions of web pages. And is also estimated that 70% of people click on the first link returned from a search query. So, the chances of your website getting organic traffic from a Google search is decreasing.
Indexability
So, let’s look at some of the factors that can affect the ability of Google to index your site, and therefore even having a chance to be in a search result.
Technical issues
Technical issues such as broken links, server errors, or incorrect use of robots.txt file can prevent search engines from crawling and indexing a website.
Website structure
A website’s structure and organization can affect its indexing. Sites with clear and logical structure make it easier for search engines to crawl and understand the content.
Content quality
High-quality, original, and relevant content is more likely to be indexed by search engines. Thin or duplicate content may be excluded from search results.
Site speed
Slow-loading pages can impact indexing as search engines may not be able to crawl and index all pages on a site.
Mobile-friendliness
Mobile-friendliness is an important factor in website indexing as search engines prioritize sites that are optimized for mobile devices.
Backlinks
The quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to a website can also affect its indexing and search engine rankings.
Social signals
Social signals, such as likes, shares, and comments on social media platforms, can also impact a website’s indexing and search engine rankings.
Addressing with White Hat
As you have seen the factors that affect your abiliity to be indexed, let’s look at where white hat techniques work just fine.
Technical Issues, Website Structure, Site Speed, Mobile Friendliness – this is all you, there are plently of tools that will highlight your problems, you just need to fix them.
Addressing with Black Hat
This just leaves Content Quality, Backlinks and Social Signals.
Now Content Quality can be mostly all on you, but there are tools out there that can greatly assist in the production on content, they can analyze your content and let you know if easy to read, has enough keywords, proper use of H1 tags, etc, etc.
Where Black Hat techniques come into play are plagiarizing content, using article spinners to re-write the content. Creating multiple sites that share the similar content and linking between them.
These are called Private Blog Networks, and they will work, you just have to know the right amount and frequency of backlinks, the trick here is to make it look like they organically grew into a group of separate blogs that slowly start linking to each other over time.
Backlinks help Google know how you site ranks in terms of authority. It is a reflection of your reputation. This is very hard to get organically. Even White Hat techniques here seem to rely on luck, or using paid networks, or guest posting. Black Hat techniques may employ using the Private Blog Network, paying webmasters to post your backlinks, link exchange networks, or malicious code to insert backlinks. Or, even sending your opponents to spamming sites for backlinking to reduce their authority.
Social Signals, White Hat tells you to put out your articles on social media, create content and always be linking back to your site. Maybe you could go viral? Black Hat may be find something that went viral already, copy it and make it look like your content in the hopes it could go viral again. Another one would be to have influencers with many followers promote your website for a day, there are many that would do so for a small fee.
Well, I hope you find this interesting, if you would like me to expound on any topic please leave a comment below.
thanks
Black Hat SEO Tool
