Careful-Avoid The 3C’s Of Black Hat Search Optimisation

Webmasters and businesses fret day and night over the tiptoeing rankings of their websites on search engines. It starts to hurt when we see our competitors jumping off over us without even putting the least desired effort. Haven’t we been witness to websites getting ranks without an iota of relevant content to talk about? Have we not seen competition piggybacking on industry numero uno’s branding to pull themselves off the gutter. 

There are numerous off-the-record strategies that companies deploy to beat the competition. Link farms, paid links, camouflage content, cloaking, gateway pages are some of the more recent strategies that have taken hold. 

1. Cloaking

Recently we came across a head spinner ourselves. The client asked to do a rank analysis of certain keywords. What we found was way beyond astonishing. The domain urls being optimised kept on changing over the months (looking from previous reports). Once we were done with the report, they asked their current service provider for an explanation. They sent out the rankings and it were completely off from ours and not only that, the optimised urls had also been altered. This happened within a span of a week. After careful analysis, we found they were using cloaking strategies and gateway pages which had no content of their own to promote the website. Eventually, the results took a beating over the months. 

2. Camouflage

Invisible content specifically meant to deceive the search bot with stuffed keywords is a strategy used to gain rankings faster. These content modifiers use transparent themes or white backgrounds to mask it from being read by the site visitor. But the search bot can index it. The keyword stuffing ends up blacklisting the website beyond repair.

3. Commenting (Spam)

This one is not new to any webmasters. Leaving links on comment section to get the piece of link juices is not uncommon but is considered spamming by the search bot. Even though bloggers use ‘no follow”, there are softwares that can create these backlinks in a matter of minutes. More importantly the content adjoining the link is mostly a ‘copy and paste’ work, which makes all the effort worthless. 
The search parameters have been evolving over the years and black hat has been keeping up. Your website can be penalised for life if search bot catches you in the act. An easy way out would be to work on good sharable content, and keep search optimisation simple. A good SEO expert would avoid the pitfalls and patiently work overtime to create a structure that brings long term benefits for a project. Don’t be fooled into quick fixes, hire only a professional SEO Agency Gurgaon.