If you’re a business owner, or if you have a website, then you probably know at least a little about SEO. You may have hired an SEO company Orange County or you may have someone on staff who does optimization themselves. Whichever is the case, it pays to know what techniques are considered black hat SEO. You don’t want to try and get away with something because you thought it would save time or direct more traffic to your site, only to get slapped with a penalty by Google.

Paid Links

Some SEO techniques are considered “gray hat,” meaning they’re not entirely on Google’s radar, but they’re still a little shady. This isn’t one of them. If you’re paying for links to your website, then it’s black hat, period, and you shouldn’t be doing it. The big problem with paying for links is that once you pay for them, you have no idea what quality they’re going to be. You want lots of sites to be linking to yours, but if they’re not well-regarded sites, then the links are going to do more harm than good.

Spam Comments

These are absolutely infuriating, and it’s no wonder Google and other search engines will penalize you for them. You want comments on your website because they indicate a level of engagement, and search engine algorithms like that. The problem with hiring a company to drum up site traffic for you, and then finding out that the comments on a thread are gibberish, is that search engines are going to figure it out quickly too. Like paid links, there’s no gray area here. You need to make sure that this sort of behavior isn’t happening, or penalties are unquestionably coming your way.   

Haven’t I Seen This Before?

The last thing worth mentioning is duplicate content. Some companies or individuals are lazy and clumsy enough to copy and paste whole articles or sections of text from other websites and try to pass it off as their own. Let’s call this what it is: plagiarism. We shouldn’t even have to expound about why this is wrong. It’s unethical, and you’re going to get some well-deserved penalties if you try it.

These are only three of the most prominent black hat techniques. There are more, and people are always coming up with new ones. Just know that for each new trick that comes out, search engine algorithms are going to have an answer for it. Get traffic the honest way and post original content, and you have nothing about which to worry. Letting your customer base grow organically is the only smart way to go.