#395: Black Hat SEO Guide, Episode 3

The consequences of using shady content marketing tactics are severe. In addition to getting black listed by the search engines, you might get sued for copyright infringement if you've plagiarized any of your content.

It seems like there are new SEO and link building strategies popping up every day that promise to increase traffic and profits in no time flat. But before we go ahead and employ these 9 really bad ideas, let's take a moment to ponder the long-term implications: You could be banned from the search engines or even worse—get sued!

In the past, search engines only looked at keywords to determine relevance. But since search algorithms have evolved, they now look at other factors as well. For example, if you try to target a keyword like "gambling" but your website is about social media marketing then the search engine will know that this is an irrelevant keyword for you and drop your rank accordingly. To avoid being penalized by Google's latest ranking algorithm update, it's crucial not to use words on your site that don't pertain to its topic of focus; otherwise, you might be dropped from higher rankings.

Irrelevant Keywords

Search engines know when a page contains irrelevant keywords because the subjects will be mismatched. For example, a social media marketing website containing gambling keywords will not seem right to search engines. The only place where gambling keywords will make sense is on sites with content like addiction recovery or typical casino games.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is not a side dish at Thanksgiving. It's a black hat tactic that involves stuffing a bunch of keywords and phrases into one webpage or article. If you are practicing keyword stuffing, then you are probably using irrelevant keywords as well.

In the past, this practice tricked the search engines into giving weight to stuffed pages based on all the keywords present. However, today, it does nothing more than confuse users browsing for relevant information, which in turn leads to lower rankings and higher bounce rates for websites trying to rank high in Google's SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Article Spinning

Article spinning should get the award for the worst black hat SEO tactic in existence. This is when you take an article and feed it into an automated system that replaces adjectives with synonyms and reorders your sentences to create a new article that appears unique.

Unfortunately, spun articles almost always appear to be written by someone with poor grammar. That's the nature of automating this process!

Clickbait

Clickbait is a problem for media organizations that want to have an honest relationship with their readers. Some of the worst clickbait comes in the form of misleading images attached to stories posted to social media. For instance, you might see a preview image of your favorite actor with a title that reads, "These Celebrities Didn't Age Well." When you click on the link, you won't find any mention whatsoever about your favorite actor from this article. The only reason they were used was because they are famous and would attract attention to the story and get people clicking through just so they can be disappointed when nothing happens at all on their end.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is exactly what it sounds like, when a site publishes the same content on more than one page. However, while Google has confirmed there's no duplicate content penalty, sites are penalized for publishing duplicate content.

Put simply, if you publish three webpages with the same article and Google finds out about it - they'll only display one of your pages in their search results.

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