Taught by Tina May
I can’t even tell you how many clients I’ve worked with who have hires 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.
Something like ‘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@company.com’
To any real person, it’s just so blatantly obvious that you’re writing for the bots not for real people and while this did work for a little while years ago, thankfully Google’s algorithm has gotten much more sophisticated since then and it recognises this as keyword stuffing.
So while it is important to include the relevant keywords in your headings and copy, you want it to feel natural, as long as you’ve mentioned the keywords once in the title, at least one heading and the body copy is relevant to those keywords you’ll be ok.
You don’t have to always use the phrase in sequence for google to recognise that relevance.
For example the phrases might include ‘made from 100% organic cotton’ ‘the softest bed sheets’ ‘why cotton sheets?’ rather than just repeating the same phrase — you know, the way you would speak to someone if you were talking to them in real life.
Hidden text is when you’re writing lots of text in really small font, or the same color as the background, or using CSS to position it offscreen where it’s not actually readable.
This is another deceptive one that marketers would use to try and sneak into lots of different keywords like 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 trying to keep less text on the page from a design perspective but still wanting lots of ‘relevant’ content.
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 sub-headings where the bigger bolder headings have the short snappy catch phrase you want, like for example ‘only the best’ and then above or below that you include a heading that says ‘The highest rated organic cotton bed sheets in Australia’ or something like that.
Remember that when it comes to heading hierarchy (h1 is the page title, h2s are the next most important headings, then h3s etc) you don’t have to visually have the same hierachy - just because a heading is bigger doesn’t mean it needs to be a h2, so here you would make the relevant heading a higher level like a h2, while the ‘fluff’ heading would either be a lower level heading like ‘h4’ if it was still relevant in some way, or just a paragraph or span that was styled to be big if it had no relevance.
Creating content isn’t easy, but high quality content is one of google’s top ranking factors. So to get around that, a common black hat technique is to copy paste or auto-generate content 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 penalised by Google.
When clients ask me for something like this, typically to rank highly for each of those locations, then the only reliable way to do that is to actually customise the page for each location. Airbnb is a great example of this, rather than just create location pages which serve exactly the same content and say to ‘book an airbnb’ they add value to relevant context to each page, show only the properties in that location, and often include a little 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 then re-direct 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 I’m sure for their marketing team back in the early 2000’s.
Google defines doorway pages as ‘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 where the content of the page itself is minimal and not actually giving relevant value and instead re-directing 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 America ‘Coding bootcamp in Los Angeles’ ‘ Coding bootcamp in Miami’ etc, even though you weren’t based there. Then when they get to the page that they have kind of been tricked into visiting, there is a link telling them to look at your online course instead — the page doesn’t have any value in itself it’s just a doorway to the other page.
If you had an actual directory giving valuable information that answered the query and was sufficiently unique for each city then this could be an ok 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.
Next on our list of manipulative techniques we have cloaking, where you dynamically serve different content to users than you do for search engines. Users might see the pretty, concise marketing page while search engines are instead send very long-form content intended for ranking for lots of keywords.
You’re probably seeing a pattern here - if the technique involves tricking google or tricking your users it’s probably not going to be a smart idea in the long term.
This is probably one of the most pervasive black hat techniques. When people noticed that having backlinks, links from other websites, were increasing your SEO ranking that led to a few entrepreneurial souls to start selling backlinks.
But creating high quality websites with relevant content that linked back to your website in a meaningful way is hard work, so instead they created hundreds of dummy websites, link farms, where their only purpose was to link back to their clients.
This is why Google put in place measures to understand not just how many links your site was receiving but also the quality of those links — were they coming from a reputable source? Was the content of the page they were linked from relevant to the content they were linking too? How much domain authority does that site have overall and for this specific topic.
Let’s say you sell something like maternity clothes, receiving a link from a site focused on camera gear isn’t going to be as valuable as a link coming from a site focused on motherhood, all other factors equal.
Backlinks can become a bit of a grey area, what about when you’re doing PR or networking with other industry players and offering each other shoutouts? The bottom line is that all backlinks should be earned, and you should avoid tactics like:
I’m sure over the next few years as the algorithm changes new ‘hacks and tricks’ will emerge, and the might get have a positive impact in the short term, but if I can offer you one piece of advice to keep in mind even if you forget everything else I’ve taught today it’s the ego check….
Is this technique based on the idea that I can ‘trick the system’ and outsmart google, or is it based on giving as much value as possible to users and structuring that content in a way that google understands. Any time your ego, or someone your 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.
If you have a story about SEO or question about any of these techniques, let me know in the comments!