Black Hat Tactics Are Never a Good Long Term Solution (But Some Make Bundles Of Cash On It Anyway)

Keyword stuffing, link buying, link farming, crawlers and bots - these are just some of the terms that you might hear when you take a wrong turn in an SEO forum. These tactics are largely considered "Black Hat SEO," or SEO strategies that search engines find deceptive. They can be used in a "Grey Hat SEO" way that allows you to circumvent the rules to your great benefit, but they are almost always a path to failure in SEO.

Gone are the days when you could hide text to human eyes, but show it to Google crawlers. The AI driven search algorithms are now much more aware of your tricks and games. And yet, the smarter the search algorithms become, the more clever the Black Hat tactics you will find hidden in the depths of Black Hat World.

Keyword stuffing is when you overload your website with keywords or use irrelevant ones to game search engines. It's a useless SEO technique that can get you banned from Google, but some brands still use it.

When you over-optimize your website with keywords, you can use them in the content, meta tags and in the backlink anchor text. Some publishers even used hidden text the same color as the background to add keywords that visitors won't see but search engines will. Other publishers will load the footer with cities they are trying to rank for, such as tree trimming in repeated multiple times followed by a city or town name.

Keyword stuffing used to work years ago, not it certainly does not now. Sometimes, it's hard to write about a topic without using the keyword too much. You need to find synonyms; Google will understand and rank your site accordingly. You should aim for an exact match keyword density of two percent or less.

It's hard to understand why some publishers still stuff their website with keywords, but they do. They may have read about it in an old article about SEO or in a forum where people use black hat tactics. A few rogue SEO agencies or freelancers still use the tactic, since a client can see their site rise in the search results temporarily. The client pays and then the site gets deindexed after the check clears.

Not only will Google ban a site that uses keywords unnaturally, the site offers a poor user experience. Writing to inform your visitors is always better than trying to fool search engines. You'll earn repeat visitors and more conversions when you provide quality content.

Black hat tactics never work long-term. It may take longer to rank well with quality content, but it's worth the effort. You won't have to worry about your site getting banned from search engines.