| Concept |
References |
Answer |
Accepted Praxis and Remedy |
Google
Response |
| Keyword Stuffing |
Hubspot |
Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of filling your content with irrelevant keywords in an attempt to manipulate where the page ranks on search results pages. Adding multiple variations of keywords where they add no value creates a bad experience for users. It may also cause your page to rank for irrelevant queries. |
|
Penguin |
| Keyword Stuffing |
Google |
Examples:
- Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value.
- Blocks of text listing cities and states a web page is trying to rank for
- Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural.
|
|
Penguin
(via Yoast) |
| Cloaking |
Hubspot |
Cloaking involves showing one piece of content to users and a different piece of content to search engines. Websites practicing black hat SEO will do this in order to make content rank for a variety of terms irrelevant to their content. Spam websites will often do this to try and avoid a search engine bot finding out the spam content they serve to users. |
Tailoring your content to different groups of users |
|
| Sneaky redirect |
Hubspot |
A sneaky redirect involves sending someone to a different URL than the one they initially clicked.
Another example is redirecting a highly authoritative page with lots of backlinks into another irrelevant page |
Redirects should only be used for the purpose they were designed.
e.g. consolidate content |
|
| Poor quality content |
Hubspot |
Poor quality content that’s of no value to the searcher is also a common practice in black hat SEO. |
High quality content. Use graphs, data, interviews |
Panda |
| Duplicate content |
Hubspot |
This includes content scraped from another website either by a bot or a person. Follow our discussion on duplicate content. |
Content should unique as for the keywords. |
Panda |
| Invisible keywords |
Hubspot |
Adding invisible keywords to your content is also a prohibited practice. Some websites that engage in black hat SEO do this by making the text the same color as the page background. |
Each keyword must have same color as normal text |
|
| Bait and switch |
Hubspot |
Creating content surrounding a topic you want to rank for. Once the page is ranking in results for this topic, the content is swapped out for something else. This creates a negative experience for searchers as the content they click-through to see no longer exists. |
Content should be kept, even after a high authority is built |
|
| Paid Links |
Hubspot |
Search engines like Google strictly ban the buying and selling of links.
|
Avoid paying any other site to link to your content. |
Penguin
(via MOZ) |
| Paid Links |
Google |
“any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.” |
Google will penalize both buyer and seller of links once the practice is detected
Remedy: Google Search Console Disavow Tool |
Penguin
(via Yoast) |
| Link Farms |
Hubspot |
Website or a collection of websites developed solely for the purpose of link building
Beware that any SEO |
Reduce number of links to one specific domain.
Content should link to many website.
High-quality content. |
|
| Structured Data |
Hubspot |
Misleading reviews schema markup is probably one of the most popular types, e.g. 5 star reviews |
structured data to a page displaying a podcast, recipe, book among other products and services. |
|
| Blog comments spam |
Hubspot |
Link to your website in blog comments.
Still used for example in Fiverr
spammy way of getting links to your website
|
|
Penguin |
| Unnatural Links |
Moz |
For example, an insurance company in Tampa could fill Internet forums with spam comments linking to itself as “best insurance company in Tampa”, |
|
Penguin |
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