15 Black-Hat Marketing Techniques and Its Negative Impact on SEO and Ranking

As a business owner in Newport Beach or anywhere else in Orange County, it is our dream to get to Google’s top rank. We employ marketing skills and strategies to crawl our way up to that dream. However, are we doing all these “white-handed?” Here are a few “Black-Hat Marketing” techniques which an SEO company might not know or otherwise turn a blind eye on:

1. Short Content. Content is the name of the game now and if you were used to short contents, it’s high time you reassess your strategy. Based on what Travis Bliffen of Website Magazine said, a content need to be more than 300-words long if you want to develop an optimized one.

2. Keyword-Rich Content. If you mentioned your keywords at every turn while doing it on number #1 (i.e. short content), ranking might not come easy. Holding on to the value of keyword density is not so necessary these days. What matters to search engines are contents that will answer the reader(s) questions regarding a particular topic and should cover all possible inquiries about it. Keywords are still beneficial of course, but the content’s theme takes priority.

3. Title with keywords. Your content title doesn’t need to contain the keywords you try to optimize anymore. What matters is that the title is relevant, interesting and even funny to attract viewers into your site easily.

4. Stuffed interlinks. The purpose of interlinks is to spread site visits thus promoting site equity but if you over-optimize these links, it might get your ranking in trouble. What you need to do instead is to use natural words that you can optimize instead of interlinking the keywords you want the content to rank for.

5. Over-optimizing your alt-text. Just because these are not seen doesn’t mean you can place all your keywords on the alt-text portion of your images. This is not going to help with your on-page SEO so there’s no use stuffing your alt images with the keywords you want to optimize.

6. Neglecting your alt-text. If over-stuffing your alt-text is bad, ignoring your alt-text also hurts your SEO efforts. Leaving your alt-text uncategorized means that search engines wouldn’t be able to ‘crawl’ on it thus missing out on opportunities that might get you ranked.

7. Stuffed Meta Keywords. Placing all your keywords on the meta tab will allow your competitors to know which keywords you were trying to optimize thus hurting your optimization effort. Try to use this section in a measured and strategic manner instead.

8. Exact Keyword Usage. Whether you are interlinking or placing exact keywords, this technique will never get you ranked. Make sure instead that you write a quality content using a series of keywords to get good SEO results.

9. Irrelevant or nonsensical keywords. According to John Rampton of Forbes, Google’s Latent Semantic Indexing has a way of identifying the true topic of a particular content so placing or incorporating nonsensical keywords just so you can rank on those keywords will just hurt your SEO efforts.

10. Forgetting Local SEO. When it comes to maximizing your brand reach, impact and impression, local SEO should be prioritized. Local viewers or consumers is what’s going to keep your business in the market so focus on creating contents that are relevant and tailored for the local community instead of putting too much effort on a national scale.

11. Article Spinning. This means altering just a few of an existing article’s title, format or word usage just to get ranked with the same keywords that that existing article has been ranked with. Duplicate articles get penalized and as John Rampton of Forbes said, original contents might be expensive but it’s all worth it at the end.

12. Funneling. Creating a page with overstuffed keywords that when clicked redirects the viewers or site visitors to a totally different page is a nasty black hat marketing technique. Even though it’ll rank for all the keywords it has been optimized for, it offers no value when it comes to giving useful information to the readers.

13. Spammy Commentaries. This utilizes a software that leaves out your business links on other people’s blogs to get a lot of back links. You’ll just get a mighty frown from Google if you use this backhanded technique.

14. Buying space in generic directories. If your purpose is to distribute your links to as many pages as you can without a care for the quality of the directory site(s) nor a care for the fact that the site isn’t visited by valid users and are just created for SEO purposes, then consider your ranking in deep trouble with Google and other search engines.

15. Article Scraping. This technique involves copying the content from one site to your site while you employed pay-per-click ads on your site for the sole purpose of getting sufficient search traffic-a very shady and abusive tactic especially on the site where you scraped your content from.

Drive Traffic Media is here to help you with your white-hat SEO Services and other online marketing needs to get top local rank in Newport Beach. Give us a call or fill out the form to get your free 13 online presence reports, website analysis and much more! Click here to fill out the form for the 13 reports or just call us at (949)800-6990 today.