Site Penalties are aspects of your site that break search engine rules. If you have any penalties on your website, it will be much harder, if not impossible for your site to rank well. If you discover any penalties against your site, you'll want to take care of these as quickly as you can.
Here are some black hat SEO tactics to avoid when developing your website:
Keyword Stuffing
Several of these penalties have come into existence from website owners and SEOs trying to find loopholes in the search engine algorithm or trying to exploit the measures in which certain factors are weighed. Specifically, tactics such as "keyword stuffing," in the keywords section of the meta information or even in other areas such as the meta title or description.
Another Black Hat SEO tactic is placing non-nonsensical keyword-rich copy in a super small sized point on a website is the same color as the background. This is a real "No, No" and you can get slapped with a penalty really fast, especially in a competitive industry.
Duplicate content occurs when the same content is present in more than one URL. This forces the search engine to choose whichever content it deems to be the original and can result in a decrease in traffic and search engine ranking for your site. It's best to optimize your sites with unique content not only for your SEO, but also for your users' experience.
A paid link refers to individuals offering money in exchange for inbound links from one site to another in order to boost page rankings. In general, if your SEO tactics have any sort of manipulative intent besides producing unique content for a genuinely positive user experience, then your site could be in danger of site penalties.
Doorways pages are designed for the sole intention of higher ranking for certain search queries or keywords. They usually present content with little use to visitors or serve as a funnel page to direct users to a different, more relevant destination. Usually, these are accompanied by other doorway pages with essentially the same content, which direct the visitor to the same destination. These can be subject to punishment as they are created for the search engine, not the user.
Website Penalty Case Study : BMW vs Google is a famous case of Google penalizing a website, although they don't just go after the big companies, came when BMW used keyword-laded doorway pages on their site. Many of these on-page penalties may not only break the search engine's rules, but make for a bad user experience, which is one of the reasons they are rules in the first place. Search engines want to serve the user first and if they show irrelevant pages which have been overly optimized using copy written strictly for search engines, a reader may leave quickly and trust the search engine less. Learn what penalties your website may have stopping you from doing well in the search engines, how to quickly spot them, and what to do if you have been banned by Google.
Invisible text is text which can be read by search engines, but not the user. Usually, this is used for more keyword stuffing. For example, if your website had a white background, developers could write keywords in white text. Search engines now see this text as spam, and decrease rank accordingly.
Link farms
In the old days, people used to boost their rankings by creating a network of sites designed to link to each other or a single target page. Today, this is a good way to diminish your credibility and worth to search engines.
Google and other search engines are moving towards optimizing the internet for user experience above all else, establishing ranking by using indicators such as content quality, mobile optimization, and search relevance for rankings. Once you are trying to manipulate users with greedy or malice intent, you are probably in the danger zone. Keep your web building and SEO clean and ethical. As long as you're developing your website with users in mind, you should be in the clear.
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