How To Identify Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO refers to the practices that violate Google terms and regulations. Under this, the content is tailored for online search engines not for visitors. It suggests deceptive both the algorithms and the reader.

Because web success does not come easily in such a competitive market, dirty SEO can momentarily assist a website to rank higher in Google. Usually, some sites do not understand they are struggling with dirty SEO, and they are penalized for this.

How Do Black Hat SEO Harmful?

While you stick to the White Hat SEO practices, your competitors will be outranking you using the black hat SEO. Dirty SEO, SEO spam, or black hat SEO are the common practices that your competitors may use rank higher on search engine result pages. Here are signs that can help to find whether your competitors are using the black hat SEO techniques.

Signs Of Black Hat SEO

• Keyword Stuffing

  When you properly use the keyword stuffing in the content, it will improve the ranking. But, some websites have generated content using keywords for an excessive number of times. This is a common black hat SEO technique that is applied to rank and grow faster.

  To identify keyword stuffing in bad SEO, go through the content of your competitor’s site to check if the keywords or phrase seems to be entirely out of context. The keyword stuffing is not easy to identify on the website as Google regularly changes the guidelines on how to use keyword in the content.

• Domain Squatting

  This is the trick to redirect the visitors to another website rather than a genuine one. For example, you want to access ‘webfactor.ca’ and when you click, you reached ‘webfactor.ca’. This is because you overlook the extra T in the domain name.

  Check the domain squatting on your own whether someone is using your brand name with bit changes for tricking the users.

• Paid Links

  The use of paid links on your website is one of the essential factors Google takes to rank you. In case, the sites with a better domain authority linked to the website, Google considers the user to be more authoritative.

  To identify your competitor’s site for paid links, you must detect the words that are hyperlinked. If these words do not show any connection to the link, then they are paid.

• Article Spinning

  Several tools are used for article spinning or content automation. It uses the synonyms to change in syntax, which makes the content look different, but the idea remains the same.

  If the website owner has used the spinner, the content over the website will look like a jumbled mess. But, some high-quality tools can produce creative content.

• Cloaking

  Do you ever visit the links that have solution of your query and when you click on them you redirect to irrelevant information? If yes, these websites are known as cloaked websites. Such sites are accidentally listed on the top of Google.

  This is another common black hat SEO trick, and several websites use cloaking to get search engine ranking. Generally, it happens for the short term as it is against Google terms for SEO.

Other Bad Practices For Higher Ranking

Apart from black hat SEO tricks mentioned above, there are several other techniques that your competitors may use, including:

• Fake Clickbait
• Page Swapping
• Comment Spamming
• Link Exchanges
• Hidden Hyperlinks
• Social Media Network Spam
• Private Blog Networks
• Hacking

A few SEO tools and your thorough attention can enable you to identify your competitors that are using the dirty SEO tricks to rank higher on Google.

If you are unable to identify and handle the black hat SEO on your own, let us work for you. At WebFactor, our team of SEO professionals in Burlington is skilled and familiar with the entire rules and regulations of Google.

We can help to rank your site on the top of search engine result pages using white hat SEO and providing a long term solution. Feel free to contact us and discuss your project needs with our professionals.