The days when you could use certain, if not all, black hat SEO techniques are long gone yet there continues to be those companies who will employ them. These are the short cut people, the slackers who are looking for the quick fix, that instant gratification. SEO marketing to rank your site as high as possible is both and art and a science and most of all is a long term investment. If you want to rank well over the long term, then proper SEO techniques and strategies need to be followed. However, there will be those who turn to the black hat techniques and they will get burned by them eventually.
Here are a few black hat techniques you need to avoid at all costs:
- Perhaps the most notable of black hat SEO blunders has to do with link building. Believe it or not, many companies continue to buy links from less than reputable link brokers. If it is one major thing that Google does with regard to its SEO guidelines, it’s tracking links. You will leave a trail and Google can distinguish between links that were acquired through legitimate efforts and those that were just bought and thrown up.
- The other major area that Google, especially their Panda and Penguin updates, will focus on is content. Creating engaging and effective original content, be it articles or video, takes serious long term effort. Again, those short cutters will get lazy and either outright copy pieces or they will simply list the content with a link back to the original story. Duplicate content is frowned upon even at those sites who only create maybe 20 or 30 pieces of content and then continually rotate them all through time and time again. Also, with written content, keyword stuffing is no longer done. If you are doing it, your rankings will begin to suffer greatly.
In the end, it is always best to try and create your brand awareness with the strongest SEO efforts possible. There are best practices that you should be adhering to and it will be worth it to in future rankings to do so.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
