Beware of The Top 3 Black Hat Marketing Methods

Beware of The Top 3 Black Hat Marketing Methods that can get you banned

In the race to have your website ranked highly in search engine results pages, don’t fall for Black Hat marketing methods. Black Hat marketing is a term used to refer to marketing using SEO (Search Engine Marketing) in a way that isn’t ethical.

Table of Contents

Link Farms
Keyword Stuffing
Doorway Pages
Bonus

The definition of Black Hat SEO is the manipulation of search results to conform to a search engine’s native algorithms. In a very small nutshell, Black Hat marketing methods use SEO to give a website fake metrics in an effort to improve its score in the search engines.

Instead of focusing on productive, long term strategies, those who practice Black Hat marketing are looking for quick, short term results. Not only can Black Hat marketing scams negatively influence customers, but they can also result in your site being permanently banned from the search engines.

Since search engines are a major way of bringing in natural traffic, you don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize your good standing. It’s important to learn what these Black Hat marketing methods are and what you can do for traffic and rankings instead.
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Link Farms

Originally, search engines ranked a site based on the number of links to it (backlinks). This quickly led dishonest website owners to create a system that is now commonly referred to as link farming.

A large pool of webmasters would each link to other websites that in turn linked back to them (hence the term – “backlinks”). If a webmaster had fifty other webmasters working with him then he had fifty links to his own site, making his site appear more valuable to search engines.

Of course, this method is no longer effective due to the increasing ability of search engine algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) to recognize this technique.  But if you look, you’ll find it still being promoted by unethical marketers.

Correct method?

The proper linking method is to try to get links from websites relevant to your own. Contact webmasters of sites that are well written, informative and have a strong PageRank in the search engines.
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Keyword Stuffing

Another common Black Hat method was to stuff pages with keywords. This could be done by using words printed in text that is the same color as the background or by simply writing sentences that overuse your keywords.

Regardless of the method used, this is still a really bad idea and search engine algorithms will penalize your website.

Correct method?

It’s better to try using keywords in your text headings, naming your website pages accordingly, setting up your permalink structure properly, and writing carefully-crafted sentences that are relevant instead of garbled keyword-rich paragraphs.
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Doorway Pages

Another of these Black Hat marketing methods to avoid is doorway pages. These are pages containing keywords relevant to the visitor’s search term but that contain no real information and contribute nothing to the website.

These pages were used to get you ranked in the search engines but they always eventually get detected and your site will probably get banned.

Correct method?

Instead of using doorway pages, write articles relevant to your business and submit them to search engine directories.

Include your link in the bio box or body of the article (if allowed) and you have created another link back to your website. You can also post comments on other blogs in your niche and gain extra traffic that way. Make sure your comments are relevant and on the topic of the post.  Anything else is spam.
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Bonus Hint

Avoid any kind of bots for driving traffic to your site.  They will not only kill your search engine placement, but they will kill many top affiliate programs. More on that in another post.  For now, just stay away from the top 3 Black Hat Marketing methods and you won’t regret it!
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