If you’re looking to hire an expert to improve your website’s Google rankings, the first thing you need to understand is the type of search engine optimization (SEO) strategy your service provider plans to use. In general, SEO professionals employ unethical or white hat SEO tactics.
How would you know the difference?
White hat SEO strategies strictly adhere to Google’s guidelines. These guidelines are put in place to ensure that your users get the most relevant and accurate information related to their search keywords. With white hat strategies, you don’t need to worry too much when Google announces improvements to the current version of its search algorithm, as most of these changes are geared towards removing SEO tactics that cheat the system.
Unethical SEO strategies employ deceptive practices that often go against Google’s rules to improve your page rank in the short term, but can permanently damage your website’s reputation once Google discovers these tricks. Google can penalize your site by lowering its ranking or ban it altogether.
Although unethical SEO strategies can seemingly give you a competitive advantage over those who stick to the rules, there are a number of reasons why this strategy can be detrimental to your business. Google is always updating its algorithm to filter out these practices and penalize sites that use them.
Here are some unethical SEO tricks to be aware of and avoid:
Invisible Text
Some websites would insert certain keywords into their websites and hide them by matching the font color to the background. Even though visitors couldn’t see these hidden words, Google’s algorithms could still detect them. This has given some sites higher page ranks in the past. Today, these tricks are rendered ineffective because Google has taken notice of this strategy and has addressed the problem.
Covert
This technique used two different HTML addresses, one intended for the visitor and the other designed for the Google bot. Sites that used Adobe Flash could do this because Google was unable to see the information contained on these particular sites, allowing some developers to display two different types of content. As a result, visitors will find that the page they are shown has nothing to do with their initial query, which ruins the user experience. Google always aims to provide quality interactions with its search engine, so to prevent this from happening, it penalizes sites that employ this practice.
duplicate content
Some web developers plagiarize articles from popular blogs or websites in hopes of driving more traffic to their own site and improving their page rank. It’s essentially a “copy and paste” process. Of course, this brazen act of stealing content is prohibited, and sites that do so will be subject to penalties, such as lower page rankings. Google encourages creators to produce unique and valuable content that will benefit the online community.
Content reformulation
Some try to avoid plagiarism by using software programs that simply change some words in an existing article that is pulled from another website with synonyms. This process of automating and rotating content to create an “original” composition can result in a disjointed and sometimes incomprehensible piece that provides no new insights.
link farms
This method involves creating multiple websites and using links that link to each other to trick Google into recognizing them as a reliable source of information. This gives the illusion that your website is popular and arouses great interest from readers. Google now has the ability to find these fraudulent backlinks because it can recognize that these sites often have little to no relevance to each other. Once you identify this red flag, it can result in a huge drop in your page rank.
