Blackhat SEO techniques are forbidden to use. Such techniques will get your website penalized and de-indexed immediately after or without getting the rank. Yes, you read it correctly. There is no way to get yourself protected from the penalty after using the blackhat techniques. I am mentioning some practices that help you get the penalty quickly and with no extra effort.
Blackhat SEO techniques are considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides users with different results than they expected.
Following are some blackhat techniques to get your website spammed and de-indexed.
- Cloaking
- Hidden Text and Link
- Paid-Link and Link Schemes
- Thin Content
- Sneaky Redirect
- Automatically Generated Content
- Scrapped Content
- Doorway Pages
- Keyword Stuffing
- User Generated Spam
- How to Report Spam, Paid Links or Malware
Cloaking
Creating two versions of the page and showing different versions to the actual user and search engine bot is called Cloaking. You can initially get some advantages but the search engine will identify the practice quickly. It leads your website to permanent de-indexing.
Hidden Text and Link
Some SEO practitioners stuff the keywords excessively in the page to get quick ranking. These texts/keywords are hid using same font and background colour, setting the font size to 0 (zero) etc. This practice also violate the webmaster guideline of Google. People practice it to manipulate the search ranking.
- Using white text on a white background
- Locating text behind an image
- Using CSS to position text off-screen
- Setting the font size to 0
- Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph or hyperlinking a single character or just a dot(.).
Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:
Paid-Link and Link Schemes
Links are used to determine the reputation. But some SEO practitioners use blackhat techniques to manipulate this process to get an advantage.
Some SEOs and website owners engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.
Source: Google’s advanced SEO guidelines for paid links
Not all paid links violate Google’s guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Specify that the links were purchased for advertising by doing one of the following actions:
Adding a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute to the <a> tag
Read more about the outbound link tags.
Thin Content
Under this practice, you create a webpage with many words but not authentic or little content. The content that you try to use to rank by just showing scraped or other cookie-cutter pages that don’t add substantial value to users. This practice can help you get Google’s message in your Search Console’s manual action report section.
Sneaky Redirect
Sneaky redirects display content to human users that is different from that made available to crawlers. It deceives search engines and violates Google Webmaster Guidelines to redirect a user to a different page with the intent to display content other than what was made available to the search engine crawler.
When you access illegal websites of P@ (rn), G@m bling, or Far (ma), you are redirected to unsolicited other websites. These redirects help the webmasters to earn extra for redirecting you to another website. That’s why Good P@ (rn) and G@m bling sites do not use redirections and you enjoy their content without any interruption.
Automatically Generated Content
We use this process to save our money from being spent on content writers. We can generate loads of content using an automated process. The quality of content can not be good enough to get your webpage ranked ethically. That’s why some software just creates random content with a stuffing of keywords.
Some example cases include, but are not limited to:
- Text that makes no sense to the reader but which may contain search keywords.
- Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing.
- Text generated through automated processes, such as Markov chains.
- Text generated using automated synonymizing or obfuscation techniques.
- Text generated from scraping Atom/RSS feeds or search results.
- Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value.
Scrapped Content
Take the content from a reputed website and publish it on your website without adding any value. This type of content is called scrap content. You won’t get the penalty immediately but it may be hard for you to get genuine content ranked. The content may be good for our website but for the search engine crawler, it is purely scrapped. Because the crawler understands the pattern. The pattern of your picking the content and the pattern of the content written originally on your website. (In any case, we have seen such scrapped content ranking higher than original).
Here are some examples of scrapped content. These bullet points are actually taken from Google’s official page about Scrapped Content. This is the perfect example of scrapped content but it will rank here. I have already added so much value in the page.
- Sites that copy and republish content from other sites without adding any original content or value
- Sites that copy content from other sites, modify it slightly (for example, by substituting synonyms or using automated techniques), and republish it
- Sites that reproduce content feeds from other sites without providing some type of unique organization or benefit to the user
- Sites dedicated to embedding content such as video, images, or other media from other sites without substantial added value to the user
Doorway Pages
Doorways are pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries. You would have seen people having multiple domain names to target specific search terms. But all these pages end up taking the user to essentially the same destination. It has several names. People call it to jump pages, bridge pages, gateway, and entry pages.
Doorway pages redirect visitors without their knowledge. If a visitor clicks through to a doorway page from a search engine results page, they will be redirected with a fast redirection command to another page.
Keywords Stuffing
Keep adding keywords where it is possible to add. People stuff keywords in title, meta description, alt tag, image name, multiple times in the same paragraph, etc. Purely a blackhat technique that people think works. This stuffing technique helps you get your webpage de-indexed quickly. And if you do the same throughout your website, you would get the site-wise penalty.
User Generated Spam
Unmoderated forums posts and blog comments are examples of user-generated spam. I used to get many comments on blog posts. In those comments, they wrote on irrelevant subjects and context. Spammers just wanted to insert the link through the comments. So that they can get the PageRank advantage.
But I always keep it under my control by implementing the moderation process to approve the comment. It saved my website from being penalized. If you have a forum and have activated a moderation system, you can easily get your forum website spammed. Users will come to your website and post about irrelevant/spammy content. They will be able to insert malicious code too.
How to Report Spam, Paid Links or Malware
Google gives you an option to report spam, paid links, and malware. If you see your competitor is earning great by selling links without appropriate tags, just report it to Google. To report spam content and paid links, you need to have a google account. Report the issue here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/report-spam
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