From its name, black hat means working your way to the top through shortcuts. Simply put, you want the easy, lazy way out. While many people still use it, it is thoroughly discouraged by Google.
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To start with, let me introduce you these black hat tricks. They include: keyword stuffing, cloaking, tiny links, automatically generated content, trackback spam, gateway pages, hidden text, hacking sites for redirects or inbound links, mirror sites and rich snippet abuse.
Many people successfully use these backdoor methods to optimize their websites ranking on Google. The question is, are there ethical ways to use Black hat SEO to reach stardom? Below are 10 precise and ethical ways of using black hat SEO.
Keyword stuffing
Unethical: Inflating use of keywords unnecessarily in your content so as to improve your SEO by deceiving the search engine.
Ethical: Instead of keyword stuffing you can use user-generated tagging. This is also known as social indexing or social classification which creates an acceptable and readable network of metadata thus improving the relevance and precision of your page contents.
This method allows your users to pose questions or even tag questions. In return, this produces user produced content in massive amounts.
Cloaking
Cloaking is whereby links that are shown on the search engine show something different to the users.
Ethical: Ensure the content matches the links shown on the search engines. It attracts traffic and trust from users as well.
Portal, gateway or doorway pages
Unethical: Having pages capturing an array of queries based on geography without any relevant or informative information.
Ethical: Ensure the quality of your doorway pages by turning them into real pages where users can love to come back any time because they are warm and cozy. This will enable your pages to provide unique content that answers your users’ queries.
Page jacking
Unethical: Basically, this is theft of content. In this case, content from a legit website is stolen and copied to the illegitimate site, tricking visitors in the long run. You are able to steal both content and traffic.
Ethical: Publish other people’s work only where you have the license for the same. Ensure that you follow guidelines provided by the creative license, which can be to reference or notify the copyright owner.
Additionally, you can use what is termed as aggregation. This is adding value to the existing content to make it unique.
Small texts or hidden texts and links
Unethical: Using links embedded with CSS so as to match immediate text, use of tiny text that is almost impossible to read and use of text with the same colour as the background making it hard to be easily identified.
Ethical: Use appealing jQuery effects such as accordions for FAQS, paginating CSS and alternating navigation using scroll position or even tab navigation in filtering essential information. These tools are able to hide part of the text displayed only to display them on click for usability, searchability and accessibility.
Duplicate content
Unethical: This is where the same content is reposted on the same site or similar sites without any additional value.
Ethical: To be more ethical, you can repurpose your articles using a variety of ways.
- You can make a brief video, slideshow or even audio record of the content to be used in other places where the users might look for the same content
- Create new posts and link them to the old ones. Rewrite the articles when you’ve gained new insights and experiences and share the new update.
- Given the right to use someone’s content, add value to it before posting and sharing it
- Write similar pieces on different sites using information your most performing content
Brand jacking
Unethical: Involves fake blogs, fake commenters, deceiving metadata descriptions, deceptive titles and affiliate marketing that fakes the original brand.
Ethical: Since this is about competition, write justified negative reviews and allowing consumers to support or disapprove your argument. Your review must present a strong case. If you win, traffic will follow you back.
General spam
Unethical: this includes delivering unsolicited and unrelated messages often to a wide audience.
Ethical: Instead of sending these bulky messages, provide quality content to groups of people. This means being able to be present everywhere there are people looking for information. Social media is an excellent system. Use social media advertising, updates and tweets and auto-responder emails. Share thoughtful comments on people’s blog posts and produce quality guest posts for other sites.
Click fraud
Unethical: Basically this is draining competitors’ marketing budgets.
Ethical: Study what makes your competitors competitive by analyzing a number of their specific landing pages from their organic listings. Then use this knowledge to refine your landing page too.
Bots
Unethical: This uses tools that multiply articles views to boost one’s website analytics in case they may want to sell the site.
Ethical: Use different tools such as screaming frog in crawling your sites so as to correct errors. The tool can also be used to identify links that are broken on other sites where you might have very crucial content.
Paid links
Unethical: Simply paying someone to publish your links inside their articles, ads or text that pass PageRank. Sometimes it can be sending free products to bloggers so that they can write about the products.
Ethical: There are two best SEO practices to employ when buying or selling links. One is to ensure that the paid links clearly appears to the search engines and users as an advert, and two is to use no follow.
If before you thought that there is no way to flip the script, now you are more than informed to repurpose your use of blackhat methods to make your online presence be known. With more than 42,000 search queries being keyed in every second on Google, you top the competition.
