Whilst search engine optimisation is supposed to help boost a website’s ranking, there are some dangers to watch out for. Black hat techniques are far less prevalent than they were, largely due to search engine algorithms becoming wise to these unscrupulous methods of boosting. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not still around and can’t still land you in hot water.
If you’re struggling in the rankings and are losing business as a result, you may well be tempted over towards the dark side. But be warned, Google won’t often be fooled, so quick fixes to fundamental problems will often only exacerbate the situation. But if you’re not familiar with black hat techniques there’s a chance you could be falling into this trap by accident, so here are a few of the main pitfalls to avoid.
Keyword Stuffing
A cardinal sin for any copywriter or website. Keyword stuffing was all the rage in the not too distant past; in fact even up until a few years ago it was still reasonably common practice, despite search engines clamping down on it severely. Today though it is very much frowned upon. Copy that has been filled with keywords is difficult for visitors to read and more often than not the search engines will punish your site accordingly.
You should be safe with a keyword density of around 5%, but don’t become obsessed by their frequency. As long as they are included in the onsite content and behind the scenes HTML, you should have enough to gain the search engines’ attention.
Hidden Text
If you don’t want to ruin the visible content by filling it with keywords you might be tempted to sneak in some invisible text to fulfil the same person. Don’t! This is sometimes referred to as white text, or hidden text, but essentially it refers to any copy present on a page but can’t be read.
By having the font colour the same as the background, the copy, for all intents and purposes, is invisible. This is a major black hat faux pas and will almost certainly be punished with the sophisticated site crawlers that search engines now employ. Whilst this too was fairly common in the past, don’t be tempted to bring it into the present. It’s not new and it certainly isn’t clever.
Doorway Pages
In an effort to gain additional traffic to your website you might also consider setting up a secondary, often highly simplistic, site with the sole intention of pushing visitors to your primary site. Because this additional platform has no obvious affiliation with your original site, you may choose to optimise it using more risque black hat techniques, targeting certain phrases that will gain traffic.
This is certainly an underhanded way of gaining visitors, one which most people landing on your site may not be too happy about. Additionally if search engines uncover that you’re hosting both, you may well suffer a dip in rankings or expulsion from their listings entirely.
Cloaking
As with doorway pages, cloaking is a way of trying to fool the search engine about some of the content on your website. This is pretty much impossible to do ‘by accident’ so it is often held in very low regard, despite the apparent ingenuity involved. Essentially a cloaking site will be able to identify when a search engine spider is crawling a site and provide an alternative version of the site.
Admittedly this is often done to cover up something illicit, so it is unlikely that you’d ever even consider it. But cloaking can also be used for doorway pages, and is fairly regularly, to ensure that only the content you want to be indexed is ever seen by search engine crawlers. But as this is a clear violation of the rules set out by the leading search engines, the risks far outweigh any potential gains.
Implement Suggested Changes
Finally, if you’ve gained some SEO advice, make sure you implement the changes. It sounds simple, but search engine marketing professionals have experience in helping sites move up the rankings. It can be frustrating when this doesn’t happen immediately, but keep the faith and keep making those changes. If nothing else, it will at least give you reason enough to go and seek other SEO advice or implement changes of your own.
Depending on the current state of your site, SEO can take some time and does require a modicum of patience. Even if you hire a professional SEO agency, they will need to analyse your site, work out where it’s failing, highlight key terms and then go about implementing it all. Search engines won’t index everything immediately and as a result, your rankings may only fractionally fluctuate. But don’t lose patience, get the advice you need and certainly don’t try any of the black hat techniques explained above, it really isn’t worth the risk.
Stephen Logan works as a Copywriter for leading Hampshire-based SEO Agency Impact Media. They offer a full range of search marketing solutions including expert SEO services.
