How to Avoid Getting Penalized by Google for Black Hat SEO
Google is consciously giving users qualitative and authoritative content results through SERP for their query. To do this, it follows three steps to provide relevant results of the query i.e., crawling, indexing, serving (and ranking). The first step “Crawling” is needed to find out all the webpages that are available on the web. At here, one question will arrive on your mind which is “What is crawling and why is it needed by Google?” To answer this, consider a library – a room which is full with books and Journals. Now consider a case where books are not well organized on the shelves, but they are spread all around in the library, even there are no shelves at all for the books and no one is there to do this. After assuming this, how will be you able to find the book which you need most? It would really be troublesome for you to find required book, even if you think to find it out by your own selves then what will be the probability that you will find that book and how much amount of time will it take to find book? This is the same case with web, trillions of webpages are on it and these webpages don’t have any registry on web to reach them. At here, Google acts as the librarian and its server acts as library where Google stores its Index for all known pages, and you might be aware of the librarian job. Basically his/her job is to look all the books, index them by book’s category and then by book’s writer name or by book’s title (as case may be), place them on shelves, and issuing books to its member. Google constantly search for new webpages and add them to its list of known pages on its server; also it can be happen when website owner submits a sitemap for their website to Google for crawl; and when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page. This process is known as crawling and after crawling second step takes place which is Indexing where Google analyse the content of the page and store it in Google Index (shelves of the library), so it can be used as a ready reference to search first for any submitted query by the user. After the second step, third steps takes place which is “Serving (and ranking)”. Based on user’s location, language and device Google tries to find most relevant data from Google Index and show it on SERP for the query submit by the user.
Black Hat SEO and Techniques
For websites, all the content should be meeting up with the Google’s webmaster guidelines and these guidelines need to be followed by all website owners, website designers and SEO professionals, if they want their websites rank in SERP. But somehow, if you neglect Google’s webmaster guidelines and you are attempting some unusual ways to boost ranking in SERP then it would be call as Black Hat SEO, result – website owner is charged with the penalty. Black Hat SEO is like “Hit and Try methods” practiced by SEO professionals. These methods can boost a website ranking for some time as well as can make your website a victim in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and may causes penalties on the website. According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines you should avoid these following techniques, so that your website would not get penalize:
- Automatically generated content: contents that are generated programmatically and have no involvement of human review are felt into this category. It is consider as low-quality content.
- Participating in link schemes: Link schemes deals with exchange of link for special favour i.e., monetarily purposes, cross-linking, exchanging goods or services. These links are intended to manipulate Page ranking or site’s ranking in Google search results.
- Creating pages with little or no original content: The low quality pages or shallow pages fell under this category. Automatically generated content, thin affiliate pages Content from other low-quality guest blog post, Doorway pages, scrapped content may increase the chances for low quality content, for which your site can get penalized.
- Sneaky redirects: redirect lead to move user to another URL to get further information about the relevant topic, but if redirect moves a user to other URL which has different content than relative topic and same URL has content of relevant topic for crawl by Google bot, is known as Sneaky redirect.
- Cloaking: cloaking is like same as Sneaky redirect. Technologies like java scripts, images, flash etc. are difficult to access by search engines, for which you may present html text to search engines to crawl, while showing images and flash to users is known as cloaking. It is advisable by Google’s Webmaster’s Guidelines to use descriptive text to avoid Cloaking.
- Hidden text or links: as name suggest text or links which cannot be seen by human eyes, but can be crawled by search engines will fell under this category. It can be done by setting font colour same as background colour, by setting font size to “0”, locating text behind the image, hiding link by only linking a small character like hyphen “-”, Using CSS to position text off-screen etc.
- Doorway pages: Doorway pages are the group of pages or domain sites which lead the user to one specific website or page, and are used to rank higher on specific search queries.
- Scraped content: In simple words scraped content is copy and paste content from reputed websites, placed in your website, which may not provide any additional and useful information or service to the user.
- Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
- Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
- Abusing structured data markup
- Sending automated queries to Google
Conclusion
Consider the fact that why you have launched your website, is it for producing redundant content, false-deceiving content or is your website only for search engines? If is it for human being then try to work more on your research, and provide quality and genuine authoritative content to the user, so that user can get benefits from your website. And you should think search engine as a user, and search engine optimization is the way to help search engines to understand your website content and present it to the users. Avoid Black hat techniques cause sooner or later Google find those tactics and penalize your website.
FAQ
- How does Google determine the ranking of websites in SERPs?
Google uses a variety of factors to determine the ranking of websites in SERPs, including:
* The relevance of the website to the search query
* The quality of the content on the website
* The number and quality of backlinks to the website
* The popularity of the website
* The user experience of the website
- What is black hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is a set of practices that violate search engine guidelines in order to improve a website’s ranking in SERPs. These practices are often unethical and can get a website penalized by search engines.
Some common black hat SEO techniques include:
* Keyword stuffing
* Cloaking
* Link schemes
* Duplicate content
* Spamming
- What are the risks of using black hat SEO?
The risks of using black hat SEO include:
* Getting your website penalized by search engines, which can significantly reduce your traffic
* Losing the trust of your users
* Damaging your brand reputation
* Getting your website banned from search engines
- What are the benefits of white hat SEO?
White hat SEO is a set of practices that follow search engine guidelines in order to improve a website’s ranking in SERPs. These practices are ethical and can help you to build a long-term, sustainable website that ranks well in search engines.
Some common white hat SEO techniques include:
* Creating high-quality content
* Building backlinks from relevant websites
* Optimizing your website for mobile devices
* Following Google's Webmaster Guidelines
- How can I learn more about black hat SEO and white hat SEO?
There are many resources available to help you learn more about black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Some good places to start include:
* Google's Webmaster Guidelines
* The Moz SEO Guide
* The Ahrefs blog
* The Search Engine Journal