Black SEO refers to the process where you want to get great organic results in search engines, for a short period of time. Why and how to do it? All in the following article.
Organic SEO is an ongoing process, subject to Google’s frequent changes at the search engine, to the competitor activity, and the various trends in the specific marketplace in which it operates.
Beyond that, organic SEO is a field where results cannot be guaranteed. This is why various entrepreneurs choose to implement a black hat promotion, which means they violate the guidelines and rules that Google deliberately outlines in order to achieve good search engine results that will promote the site, though for a short period of time until they receive a manual penalty.
Reasons for black SEO
Seemingly, the attempt to achieve good results in a short time seems puzzling. Why would anyone choose to invest time and resources in an Internet asset that is “going to burn” anyway? It is clear to all that at one point or another Google will come to a website that allows various obvious manipulation on its search engine, punishing it with a significant drop in rankings or even remove it from the index list?
The answers are varied:
A temporary and one-time business initiative
Occasionally, business owners will want to promote a business initiative that is clearly temporary. For example, a business that offers various services relevant to the election period, or the period in which the Olympics are aired on TV, or the period when hundreds of thousands of households in the State of Israel are confined to the World Cup.
Entrepreneurs in this field do not have the privilege of waiting long for the results of an organic promotion process that complies with Google’s rules (even if they follow Google’s rules fully – it is doubtful that they will go anywhere in the organic promotion business). These are entrepreneurs who need results here and now.
Well, why shouldn’t these businesses turn to sponsored promotion? Why risk losing a profitable Internet asset if there are other ways, seemingly legitimate, in the terms of Google? The answer is that sponsored SEO prices cost more from year to year, which is also exposed to malicious clicks from competitors.
Trial and error
Google, as mentioned, is constantly changing the rules of the game. The amount of theoretical material on the parameters that Google uses to rank sites is huge. However, the amount of practical material that relies on real case studies is limited, in part, because anyone who already holds valuable information in this area will not be quick to share it with the community.
Many website promoters choose black SEO for internet assets in their management, among other things, in order to measure the boundaries of the sector in this field, and to know what they should be careful about in the real projects they do with clients.
How does black SEO practice?
Black SEO is, in fact, a distorted view of the normal promotion processes that every website promoter knows. Black SEO takes the edge of the processes where website promoters usually set clear boundaries. Here are some common steps in the process of Black SEO:
Build a very large amount of links in an unnatural way
External link building was and remains a significant factor in the decision of search engine rankings. Getting a rich, not necessarily high-quality link profile, built in semi-automated processes, is an accepted method in the black field of SEO.
Almost every website promoter builds links as part of the promotional services it offers, whether through support websites, or through link exchange or advertising on powerful portals and magazines.
Here, in the black SEO, the intention is different: the intention is for the massive acquisition of links, especially from countries such as India, Russia or China, in order to enrich the link profile in the shortest possible time.
Keyword compression
This is a method that used to be widespread, and today its effect is less significant. In any case, the intention is to use excessive, illogical to the point of writing a clearly unreadable text, which includes a very large, unlikely frequency of keywords. Hebrew is a rich language that allows us to formulate sentences in infinite ways: from unique sentences, through connected sentences, to complex sentences with side sentences.
Any such sentence can be active or passive, present, past or future. Now, imagine that you are writing on the subject of ten sentences that say exactly the same, in such exchanges of words and others. This is keyword compression in its most common configuration.
Text hiding
One of Google’s strict rules is that: Existing text on the website should be easily and effectively accessible to every user, not just for the search engines. Hidden text can be text whose font color is very similar to the background color, or text found in areas of the screen that are not accessible to the reader.
The purpose of this text realization configuration is to earn the points we could get from Google for frequent use of a particular keyword while maintaining a clean and customized text. Hiding text is a technique that is used from time to time for black SEO.
Use of transition pages
The intention is to use irrelevant pages that contain the key words at the right frequency, only on transition pages, whose purpose is to capture user traffic from the search engines, and submit it to other pages that we want to the user to visit.
The use of transition pages allows the promoter to collect search engine traffic from high-search volume phrases, that would not necessarily lead to the pages it manages on its website.
Display different information to the user and the search engine
This appearance called cloaking. This means writing different text for the search engines (their Meta Tags – the Title Tag and the Description Tag, in particular) and the website user. In fact, this is a kind of attempt to cheat the search engine, so it will seem like some pagesare about certain content, even when they don’t.
Using many H1 titles on the page
A proper web page structure should include a single headline (H1) per page, some subheadings, and plain text among them. Frequent use of H1 headlines with keyword compression is a technique that users use in a black SEO in order to make high ranking progress of the page quickly. You can read more about using headlines here.
Content Duplication
Another improper but frequently used technique by black SEO promoters: duplication of content to help get high rank against competing websites, whether to stand out in the field or to hurt competitors.
Remember that Google is not a cop: not sure it has the resources or the desire to find out who wrote the original text found on a particular webpage. This is why content duplication is a technique that, despite its limitations, uses SEO promoters when they choose the black SEO.
In conclusion
Black SEO techniques are aimed to promote digital asset for the short term, knowing that the promoted digital asset might be damaged in the future. These techniques are most often used when it comes to a temporary and one-time service that the website owner wants to provide, usually in close proximity to these or those important events.
Some SEO promoters use black SEO techniques, among other things, to research and understand Google’s level of tolerance for violating the set rules.
