As a blogger, you’ve worked hard to create your blog, earn your readers and generate great content, but some bloggers are often swayed by the immediate recognition that comes with black hat SEO.
Black hat SEO tactics are frowned upon by the search engines, and if you’re caught implementing the following tactics into your blog, it can pose serious consequences.
Hidden Text
Some bloggers post text to their blog that is invisible to their readers, but entirely searchable by the search engine crawlers. This is usually done by make the text the same color as your background, so that your readers can’t see it. What this does for search, though, is allow you to add keywords to your blog. These keywords are then recognized by the search engines, which can increase your visibility.
Link Spamming
Backlinks are beneficial to your blog’s online success, but if you post a link to your blog everywhere you possibly can—or worse, hire a company to do it for you—you can find yourself in some serious search engine trouble. Not only is spamming frowned upon by search engines, but your readers are not attracted to it either. If you want to earn the readers, you have to come off as a professional, and link spamming is not the way to do it.
Keyword Stuffing
Have you ever come across a blog that had a random paragraph at the bottom or side of the site that contained a random grouping of words that didn’t make any contextual sense? This is known as keyword stuffing. It works similarly to hidden text, only the keywords are completely viewable. Again, some bloggers do this so that they can have a ton of keywords on their site, and these keywords can be found by search engine spiders to help their ranking.
Even if you’re not creating a random grouping of words, it’s still important that you don’t randomly throw keywords into your content if it doesn’t make sense. Your readers are going to be turned off if they cannot easily read through your content and learn something valuable from it.
Cloaking
Some bloggers use cloaking as a way to increase their online presence, and this is not a good idea. Cloaking refers to having one page that is intended for the search engines to crawl, and another page that is meant for your readers to view. This way, your cloaked page can have keywords galore while your real page can have your non-keyword stuffed content, your ads, your links and anything else that wouldn’t help your SEO.
With the way that search engines continue to change their algorithms, using black hat SEO tactics is not a smart move if you want to have a successful online presence. Not only can some tactics look poor and sway your readers to go elsewhere, but if you’re caught using these tactics, you could end up having your site de-indexed from the search engines, and this can be very damaging to the success of your blog.