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The world of digital marketing can be confusing to the uninitiated. There are many terms and phrases used that you may not understand. White hat and black hat SEO are phrases that many SEO experts use. You will want to stay away from black hat techniques as these can have severe consequences for your website. Below are some of the reasons you should concentrate on white hat techniques and what can happen if you are caught using black hat techniques.
What Is Black Hat SEO?
The search engines, including Google, all have recommendations on what website owners need to do to improve the strength of the SEO on their site. Some methods are not encouraged to enhance your overall online visibility, and they can also damage your market position, which is called black hat SEO. Some of the techniques that black hat SEO practitioners use include:
- Automated Content
- Hidden Content
- Keyword Stuffing
- Cloaking
- Link Farms & Link Schemes
- Doorway Pages
All these techniques can show you an improvement on your online visibility, but for a short time. When you are caught, you can find your website disappearing from the SERPs entirely. You should take this into consideration when hiring a company offering online marketing service. It is much better to concentrate on using authentic white hat techniques for your website and earn your rankings. Using black hat techniques could be a costly mistake for your business.
White Hat Techniques To Embrace
Using white hat SEO techniques may take a while before they take effect, but your hard work can pay dividends for a long time to come. You will want to ensure that you are not stuffing too many keywords into your content. Instead of writing for the benefit of the search engines, ensure you write it with the user in mind.
When you build links for your website, you will also want to employ genuine white hat outreach techniques to get the best results. The benefits of using this method are that the results will be long-lasting as you are using real websites, which can significantly impact your site’s overall visibility and rankings. You do not want to hide anything away from view on your website. If, for example, there are pages that you do not want the search engines to crawl, you can use a no-index tag to stop them from crawling it.
Possible Consequences For Using Black Hat SEO Techniques
If you opt for black hat SEO techniques, you may get some decent results in the short term. However, these are often short-lived, and you can find your website slipping down the rankings. You can also sometimes see that your website falls out of the index entirely, which will make it almost impossible for new users to find your site.
It also creates a poor user experience when people search for something and find your website that is not related to their search, so you will most likely find your bounce rate goes up while conversions go down. If you are going to the trouble, expense, and taking the time to do SEO on your website, ensure you use white hat techniques, or you could end up ruining your business and website.