Websites black-hat SEO is actions aimed at promotion, which are prohibited by the algorithms of the Google and Yandex search engines. These methods involve dishonest manipulations and actions, for which you can get a punishment in the form of a black list or removal from indexing. Black promotion is used to raise a site to the top 10 search engines in the shortest possible time.
Black methods are used by:
- Unscrupulous SEO companies to show a quick result and receive payments upon the fact of providing services and the result;
- Inexperienced amateurs who often try to ensure high positions for keywords for their own site;
- Resources that sell or distribute illegal content, goods, services. Since advertising such sites is prohibited, white promotion is ineffective, such sites are almost not indexed and are not shown in search engine results.
The result of such black promotion does not take long to wait. The domain falls under sanctions, is blacklisted, and the site owner, gaining valuable experience, begins to adjust further actions or turns to a specialist.
Black methods of promotion are also often used by company CEOs and specialists. Especially when working freelance, for some irresponsible specialists the only goal is to show the customer a quick result, get paid for the services and wash their hands of it. After such a fatal mistake, the customer either becomes disappointed with the concept of “promotion”, or starts the process from scratch, turning to other specialists.
Types of black SEO techniques
Methods of prohibited promotion vary - from primitive, often funny manipulations, to semi-legal, sometimes providing the result of actions. Here are some common black hat methods:
- Spamdexing (spam and index - search engine spam indicator). In this case of promotion, unnatural pages are created to manipulate search results.
- Cloaking (cloak - disguise). Search engines are shown those pages of the resource that contain keywords for algorithms, but the content of these pages differs from the real content that visitors see.
- Swapping (replacement of indexed pages). SEOs resort to this method of black promotion at the last stage of promotion, when it is necessary to send reports to the client, show “good” positions and submit the order. This method involves an unnatural change in the content of the pages after ranking by the search engine. Such pages remain in the top until the next crawl of the pages by bots, 1–4 weeks. This time is enough to submit the work and sign the closing documents.
- Doorway (entry page, creation of fake resources). These are pages that are designed only for indexing. After going to the doorway, the visitor is redirected to the promoted site.
- Linkbombing (Google Bombing, search spam). A type of spam that allows you to promote a site using non-thematic queries.
- Link building by buying backlinks (link building) is a semi-legal or gray SEO tool. This prohibited but widespread method, if used carefully, gives excellent results. To avoid sanctions, you need to buy links only from proven thematic sources with a high trust index and do it slowly.
- If you decide to promote your site using link building, registered on exchanges, do it in “manual” mode. Disable the automatic promotion and automatic purchases.
- Behavioral factor cheating. One of the most important indicators for search algorithms is the usefulness of the content. This assessment is based on the behavior of visitors. Modern bots can already “copy” human behavior. For example, bots “fake” the number of views, clicks on links, viewing time, page scrolling speed, and so on.
- Invisible keywords. One of the funny methods. It has long-lost its relevance, but is still sometimes used at an amateur level. The idea is to use hidden keywords painted in the background color of the page.
All search engines strictly punish for black promotion. To put it simply, these are attempts to present resources to the bot in a better light than they are. To avoid falling into such a trap, contact the specialists of the Astudio company for SEO optimization and receive contractual guarantees.
Website promotion white methods
Methods of white promotion of sites are also different. Unlike the use of dishonest tools, they imply constant work, patience, code optimization and continuous improvement of content.
- In this case, we start work from the audit;
- We correct technical errors;
- We work on content;
- We do internal SEO optimization;
- In the framework of SMM services in social networks, we share useful pages of the site;
- We receive natural links and mentions of the resource.
The article was written in 2014 and updated in July 2024. If you read to the end, you can rate the usefulness of the information below.
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