What can Black Hat Links do for your website?
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Optimizing websites to be on the top of the SERP is no easy task. Around the globe, there are millions, if not billions, competing for a keyword or keyword phrase, especially for the short-tail ones. The battle amongst different websites lies in what techniques does its webmasters are using.
Search Engine Regulations
What makes SEO more challenging is that search engine services have set guidelines for those who are doing SEO that applies fairly to how search engine algorithms have been programmed. These sets of rules should be followed by webmasters so that the sweet reward of being on top of the SERP is legal. That’s why webmasters and SEO junkies have devised techniques and practices that will fit to how the algorithms work.
The White, Grey and Black Hat SEO
There are three types of SEO guys: White Hat, Grey Hat, and Black Hat. These three are using different techniques for implementing SEO for your website. It could be a decent one and by-the-book, it could be a borderline illegal, or it could be a cheat in the eyes of those who are conservative in a technical sense.
Intriguing as it sounds, those who are risk-takers and kind of programming adrenaline frenzies are becoming the talk of the town amongst the community of SEO professionals. While those who linger on disputable techniques are called the Grey Hat, these people who outrightly do what is considered unethical are called the Black Hat SEOs. What are they and what are they doing?
The Black Hat SEO
We could’ve heard often that we have to work hard, but there are these people who tend to work smart than to work hard. These are the Black Hat SEO.
They are using techniques that are listed to be illegal by search engine services to make their site rank higher in the results page. Often, this technique lies in the unavoidable loopholes of the algorithm and Black Hat SEO maximizes those.
However, since techniques and practices that are considered to be illegal by search engines, opting for this technique would rather put your site at risk of being banned than getting higher rankings. These practices are great for those who are badly needing a quick improvement in their website ranks and are willing to take such high risk for the goal.
Black Hat Links: What are They?
One of the techniques that are categorized to be Black Hat is black hat link building. This practice involves playing around search engine algorithms loopholes to generate traffic for a website.
Before we proceed, let’s get to know the root which is link building. This will help us understand how black hat back links work.
Link Building
An important element to a great SEO is link building. This is getting your website linked by another through hyperlinks or simply called links which is kinda analogous to a word-of-mouth referral. Search engine spiders, robots who do crawling across the web, will follow a trail of interconnected and interrelated links on certain keywords. This means, the more links of your website visible onto a lot of third-party sites, the better your website will rank in the SERP.
White Hat Technique
An organic link building is done by having your page links being used as a reference by third-party websites. It’s like you are being cited by a different person for example, on certain related topics.
This ethical way of link building relies heavily on actively promoting your website through social media platforms, participating in relevant forums to further expand your network, and sharing your website to genuine relevant people around. You can soundly sleep at night knowing that your efforts on link building won’t be having any issues with the search engine. Consequently, this process is tedious and you have to wait for quite some time before you can reap the rewards of your effort.
Grey Hat Technique
The middle ground of the SEO spectrum is where disputable action and practices lie. Some techniques are seemingly unethical but, practically are allowable thus making it undefined and SEOs who use techniques under this category are called the Grey Hat.
Black Hat Technique
Now, considering the time that you have to wait and the efforts you have to make for your website goals to come to fruition, some people have resorted to a quicker way of climbing up the SERP ladder. That’s where black hat techniques come to play. These techniques have a quick rewarding effect on your website rank but, with the risk of getting your site banned. An all-or-nothing bid for topping the SERP.
The goal is to build links for your website to become high-ranking and you want to reduce the time needed for it to be on the top spots. Here are some black hat link building techniques and how they practically work.
Black Hat Link Building
Here are some tactics used by black hat SEO to immediately tank up website rankings.
- Webring
This is one of the oldest technique that was being utilized for website ranking. Sites within the webring are linked into each other forming a close circle of websites.
Commonly, webrings are formed by several website owners agreeing to make a webring where website A is a backlink to website B and so on, returning to website A. Hence, it produces an infinite cycle for spiders to crawl generating traffic and thus making the website rank higher. This technique, however, is regulated by the current algorithms.
- Paid Links
It has also been a practice that webmasters are buying or selling links to clients for them to boost their website ranks. A paid link is defined as any link that is given in exchange for monetary payments, exchanged goods or services, or any form of exchange.When you buy links, these link traders will put your website or page links on their posts, or comments or any article they have online. Search engines have regulated the use of this technique since there are link farms that do it spam-ly and anyone caught having paid links are penalized.
- Link Farms
Domains that went defunct or got penalized are usually refurbished into link farms so they can have a purpose. Link farms are domain that the sole purpose is to do backlinks to main money sites regardless of the content gaining the name for itself.Since the content of link farms are irrelevant, once the algorithm caught it, the traffic that is then delivered by these farms becomes null.
- Private Blog Networks
PBNs as it called, is a series of multiple domains owned by a single owner doing backlinks for one particular money site, your main website. Sort of an improved web-ring.Domains that are being used as part of the PBN are commonly old, closed domains that are being bought back and are set up to contain contents related to the main money sites even though the domain name doesn’t seem to be relevant to the topic.
Tho quite an investment and also done by white hats and grey hats, this practice is considered to be black hat when other domains are being spammy on its content and acting obviously as a link farm.
- Blog Comment Spamming
One of the best ways to gain traffic is to publish your link to platforms that have a good amount of traffic on itself such as social media, forums, and online communities. Blog comment spamming is putting your website link everywhere across the web to whatever post it maybe.What makes it risky is people who do this technique do post even on places that are not a niche with the main money site and due to the volume of the comments being done across the web, it simply just spam.
- Clickbaiting
The trend is your capital here. Good knowledge of what people in the market loathe for, what is the talk of the town, or what is the current developing story around is very useful here. Use this to be your anchor text and attach your link beneath the text.Of course, who’s not gonna click the “Free iPhone 11 Max”? Everyone wants one and many want to get it for free. However, this is misleading, irrelevant and outrightly a clickbait. Yes, you might get a huge amount of traffic but once the search engine robots detected it, the penalty is sooner than you think.
- URL Hijacking
Others call this as Typosquatting, a very promising tactic at surface level. This method is done by using a domain name similar to a famous brand, but with typographic errors. For example, you might go for gmal.com for your domain since its just one letter away from gmail.com.
Sorry though, to burst your bubbles, because search engine algorithms also do a spelling check and this kind of URL exploitation is just simply borderline imitation and definitely will ruin your site reputation.
- Irrelevant Keywords
Your website is all about dogs and general things about dogs. Some parts of your article bumped across cleaning your garden and there’s a lawnmower on the article. Now, you took that lawnmower and attached a link there. Then you’ve done it again to iPhone 11 Max that you used to take a picture of the dog.
Those words have nothing to do about dogs and that’s what irrelevant keywords. Putting links on words that have no clear relevance to your niche thinking that the spiders might crawl upon to your site when somebody searches for either of those two and thus, will generate traffic.
Clever as might sound, the rewarding effect of this technique wouldn’t last for much longer and the penalty of this mistake hurts way much that how it rewarding it is.
Pros and Cons
What are the Pros?
Surely, the pros of using black hat link building techniques are insane traffic and fast website rank turnout. Logically analyzing the techniques, it simply does ride on how the search engine algorithms work, only in an unethical fashion taking advantage of the systems’ loopholes.
There are lots of blackhat link building service providers that you can come across the web all offering aforementioned techniques. On dedicated forums and communities, you can even find more black hat services that can surely rank up your website. Results can be guaranteed if the question is will the site rank go up.
What are the Cons?
However, since this is an unethical way of doing things, repercussions are also guaranteed. Those techniques we’ve listed above are tagged by most search engine regulations, notably, Google, to be a black hat practice and thus are red flags to the algorithm. Google has developed checkers such as Google Penguin to track these malpractices. The lightest penalty you might receive is that certain traffic won’t be counted in your favor and the worst is your site might be taken down.
Our Take
The risk is high for the luck of gaining a rich reward of ranking your site to the top. On top of everything we tackled, a smart and sound judgment on what techniques to use on when is what will really drive your website ranks.
