Taught by Tina May
“Give me $100 and I promise I can get you on the front page of Google…”
That’s the kind of dodgy offer that was rampant in SEO a couple of years ago, and one that I still see today.
Think about it for a minute. Once you understand what SEO is - that you’re competing against other sites for the top spots for any given search term - any kind of flat-rate guarantee will no longer make sense.
SEO is a race, and promising that you can win that race without knowing the inside out of the competition is just impossible. Imagine if you were an amateur runner, and you were offered by a trainer that they would guarantee you to win against anyone?
Beyond the fact that their whole premise is an exaggeration, the kind of people who promote these quick-win techniques tend to see SEO as “cheating the algorithm” and tricking Google into bumping your website up to the top.
We call these “black hat” techniques as a kind of euphemism for a magic trick that isn’t real. These techniques include buying fake backlinks, hiding white text on a white background to spam hundreds of keywords, etc.
Let’s think about this for a moment.
Google is a trillion dollar company that has a team of some of the smartest engineers, marketers and psychologists in the world, continuously building a proprietary algorithm that their entire business model is based on.
The problem with these blackhat techniques isn’t just that they won’t work, it’s that the whole premise of tricking Google is a very risky move that can ultimately get you blacklisted - removed from Google searches or dropped so far in the rankings that nobody finds anything about you.
Beyond the search impact, most of these techniques have a negative impact on your user experience as well, so you risk losing trust not just with search engines but with your customers as well.
Let’s look at 6 risky techniques to avoid to make sure that you stay in Google’s good books:
I can’t even tell you how many clients I’ve worked with who have hired an ‘SEO specialist’ online to write blog post content for them and have ended up with articles that just repeat the same keywords again and again throughout the post. For example:
“Are you looking for organic cotton bed sheets? We sell the best organic cotton bed sheets. We have bed sheets in a range of sizes, all made from organic cotton. Sleeping in organic cotton bed sheets is the most comfortable way to sleep, so you should invest in some organic cotton bed sheets today. Email us for more info at organiccottonbedsheets@companyname.com”
To any real person, it’s blatantly obvious that you’re writing for the bots, not for real people. While this did work for a little while years ago, thankfully Google’s algorithm has gotten much more sophisticated since then and recognises this as keyword stuffing.
So while it is important to include the relevant keywords in your headings and article, you want it to feel natural. It’s easy to shove lots of keywords here and there, but as long as you’ve mentioned the keywords in the title, and then make your headings and the body copy relevant to those keywords, you’ll be okay.
You don’t have to always use the phrase in sequence for Google to recognise the relevance. So rather than repeating the same phrases, you might include:
And any other phrases that you would speak to someone in real life.
Hidden text is when you’re writing lots of text and it’s not actually readable. Some of the common tricks are making the text really small, giving it the same color as the background, or using CSS to position it offscreen.
This is another deceptive one that marketers would use to try and sneak into lots of different keywords. For example:
“affordable cotton sheets, budget cotton sheets, cheap cotton sheets, organic cotton sheets, why cotton sheets, buy cotton sheets, buy organic cotton sheets.”
It’s a technique that’s a mix of laziness (they don’t want to actually create that relevant content) and keeping less text on the page from a design perspective.
If you don’t want to have long SEO optimised headings throughout the page, a more effective technique is to use a mix of headings and subheadings where the bigger headings have the short snappy catch phrase:
Remember that when it comes to the heading hierarchy, it’s based on the HTML element (h1, h2, h3) regardless of the design pattern. The big “fluffy” heading could be just h4, whereas the more descriptive but smaller one could be h2.
Creating content isn’t easy, but high quality content is one of Google’s top ranking factors. So to get around that, black hat marketers would duplicate or auto-generate content just by changing just a few words. An example is location pages, where all the content is the same and then you just change the name of each one.
This not only doesn’t work, but having duplicate content can actually be penalized by Google.
If your website has a similar case, the only reliable way to rank highly for each of those locations, is to actually customize each page. Airbnb is a great example of this, so rather than just creating location pages which serve exactly the same content, they add value by showing only the properties in that location, and often include a neighbourhood guide as well.
These are kind of the cat-fishing of the SEO world, where you create pages to rank for a specific keyword only to redirect people to another page. Lots of high-profile websites used them decades ago and were severely punished - even BMW got the dreaded “zero score” and disappeared from search for a painful amount of time in the early 00’s.
Here’s the official definition of doorway pages according to Google:“Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page” and “pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s).”
This is similar to duplicate content, but with minimal content that’s not giving relevant value and instead redirecting you to another page.
An example of a doorway page would be if you were running an online coding bootcamp, and you created a page for every city in the US. For example, “Coding bootcamp in Los Angeles” or “Coding bootcamp in Miami” even though you weren’t based there. Then when users get to the page, there is a link telling them to look at your online course instead. So the page doesn’t have any value in itself, it’s just a doorway to the other page.
If it was an actual directory giving valuable information and sufficiently unique for each city then this could be a good technique, but if it’s just a gateway intended to trick people into visiting a page they wouldn’t have otherwise, then it’s not a good idea.
Cloaking is where you dynamically serve different content to users than you do for search engines. Users might see this pretty, concise marketing page while search engines instead see a very long-form content intended for ranking for lots of keywords.
This is probably one of the most pervasive black hat techniques out there. When people noticed that having backlinks from other websites increase your SEO ranking, that led to a few hustling souls to start selling backlinks.
Since creating high quality websites with relevant content that linked back to your website in a meaningful way is a long and hard work, they instead created hundreds of dummy websites (also called link farms) with a purpose to link back to their clients.
This is why Google put in place measures to understand not just how many links your site receives but also the quality of those links.
Let’s say you sell something like maternity clothes, receiving a link from a camera gear site isn’t going to be as valuable as a link coming from a motherhood blog, all other factors equal.
Now you know that backlinks can become a bit of a grey area. So you might be wondering, what about PR campaigns or networking with other industry players to offer each other shoutouts? The bottom line is that all backlinks should be earned, and you should avoid tactics like:
To wrap this up, if you do end up hiring an SEO “expert” or even a blog writer, make sure you talk with them about which techniques they will be using so that you can keep an eye out for the ones that might be considered black hat by Google.
I’m sure over the next few years as the algorithm changes, new ‘hacks and tricks’ will emerge, and they might have a positive impact in the short term. But I would hate for a simple mistake to undo all the hard work you’re doing to grow your website traffic. So even if you forget everything else I’ve taught today, I want you to keep something in mind called the ego check.
Ask yourself, is this technique based on the idea that I can “trick the system and outsmart Google,” or is it based on giving value to users and structuring that content in a way that Google understands?
Any time your ego, or someone you’re working with convinces you that you can outsmart a multi-billion dollar industry, that’s a good sign that it’s probably a black hat technique.