Ethical link building is the ultimate goal of SEO — it is valuable but requires expertise and resources. Some people try to speed up their success by using black hat link building tactics. It may seem like an easy way to get your site noticed, but black hat links can cause long-term damage, the risk of being penalized or having your site banned is high.
Black hat link builders rank quick scaling without respect to look motor rules or the quality of the joins procured. If you actively use black hat link building tactics, your site may be penalized by Google (either manually or algorithmically). Black hat link building will result in a misfortune of rankings and, in extraordinary cases, a total ban from Google search results. In this article, we have detailed 10 black hat link building strategies you should avoid.
What Are Black Hat Links?
Black hat links are joins that are built in a way that abuses Google’s search rules. These joins are designed to game Google’s algorithm and thrust a site higher in search results than it would regularly.
Some black hat links are built using automated programs that generate large numbers of referrals in a short period of time. Others use private blog networks (PBN), comment spam with links, hidden text, or link farms, etc. to construct dark cap joins. Black hat link building strategies permit site proprietors to create expansive numbers of joins in a brief period of time.
Why Should You Avoid Black Hat Link Building?
The short-term benefits of black hat links can lead to long-term punishments and harm to your site’s reputation.
Short-term benefits, long-term dangers: Black hat link building can boost rankings rapidly. But the long-term consequences are serious, with the hazard of being intensely penalized by search engines. Black hat link leading to extreme rankings drops and indeed total de-indexing.
Severe punishments: Search engines, like Google, will proactively penalize websites that use black hat SEO link building strategies. And sites will be reduced in ranks or, in certain cases, the removal of the website from search results (de-indexation).
Damage to notoriety: Utilizing black hat SEO strategies can harm your site’s notoriety, making it troublesome to recapture the belief of search engines and users.
Impact on website development: Recovering from a black hat link building punishment can be challenging and take months or even years. Long recovery time can significantly limit the traffic and growth potential of your website.
Focusing on white hat SEO helps achieve longer-term success: Focus on building long-term success by steering clear of black hat SEO tactics. Instead, invest your efforts in white hat strategies. Because white hat strategies lead to sustainable results, safeguarding your website from penalties, while enhancing your reputation for the long haul.
10 Black Hat Link Building Tactics You Should Avoid
Black hat backlinks can seriously hurt your site’s SEO metrics. To help you dodge punishments, here are 10 black hat link building tactics you ought to avoid.
- Private blog networks (PBN)
A PBN is a network of fake blogs and websites that are linked together to make manipulative joins that show up naturally. Google is skilled at detecting and demoting sites that are linked to PBNs. The way it works is that black hat SEOs buy expired domains with existing site authority.
PBN recreate these domains and content. They may use redirects to ensure that the domain doesn’t lose any link equity.
- Link farms
A “link farm” refers to a group of websites that are interconnected specifically to share valuable link equity among themselves. Link farm is considered a conventional black hat SEO tactic. The owners of the link farm make money by selling links to the site.
Link farms are easily identified through link patterns and low-quality content analysis. Participating websites can be manually penalized. Any temporary profits will disappear when the farm is discovered.
- Link spam
Link spam is the practice of placing links solely to promote one’s own website. Low-quality links are spam because they are intended to manipulate search engines and internet users. Link spam is also frequently found in directories and comments.
Spam comments are frequently irrelevant to the subject of the article and include a link to the site the spammer is attempting to promote. Another sort of link spam is directory spam. Many directories tend to be little more than empty sites with a mere collection of links contributed by various users.
- Article spinning & copied content
Article spinning is a technique used to rewrite content by replacing words with synonyms, altering sentence structures, or entirely rephrasing the text while keeping the original meaning intact.
Although article spinning can be done manually, modern approaches often use AI and complex algorithms, making it increasingly challenging to detect. For good reason, such articles reduce the quality of the internet, which is why Google penalizes you.
- Hidden text
Hidden text is text that is the same color as the background and is positioned off-screen or behind an image. It can be purposely concealed from the user using CSS or even a zero font size. Hidden text can sometimes be used for keyword stuffing. Many marketers tend to provide extensive lists of terms they wish their content to rank for in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Social media manipulation
Social media manipulation is also known as pay-per-click schemes on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. Social media manipulation activities include buying Facebook likes, Google+ +1s, or YouTube subscribers.
It also includes bots posting spammy links, fake social media profiles, and fake reviews on social media platforms. Social media manipulation has the potential to harm your search engine rankings, get your social media accounts shut down, or even damage your reputation.
- Footer links
The footer is the most important place to insert links because the footer appears on every page of your website. If you add text links to pages with new business models on a wide scale to manipulate results, Google can detect this and penalize you.
- Create a plug-in or theme
One of the black hat linking tactics you should avoid is creating a plug-in or theme. Simply put is a form of link building, where the person who wants to build links creates a plug-in or theme that a website owner can install on their website. They then add a link to their website into the plug-in’s code.
Whenever someone installs the plug-in, they automatically link back to the target website. If the plug-in is successful, this can lead to a large volume of links. Sometimes, users will speed up the process by taking over a plug-in that already has many installs.
- Hacking websites to add links
One of the most extreme forms of black hat link building is when people hack into other websites and add links to existing content. Hackers often target old blog posts that have vulnerabilities because the owners are not able to check these pages. The links remain in the content until someone finds them.
- Buying low quality backlinks
Another commonly used tactic to artificially boost a website’s domain authority is to buy low quality backlinks. Low quality backlinks are frequently obtained from websites unrelated to the content of the website being pushed, and they are frequently posted on low authority sites.
If businesses focus on buying low quality backlinks it has the potential to hurt a website’s SEO efforts and significantly lower its rankings in search engine algorithms.
How to Detect Black Hat Links
If you’re concerned that your site may have black hat links, you’ll need to detect and evacuate them. Here are a few apparatuses that can offer help you detect and evacuate black hat backlinks from your profile:
Ahrefs: Gives a point by point investigation of your backlink profile. Ahrefs also highlights low-quality joins from questionable sources like affiliate destinations or PBNs.
SEMrush: Conducts a backlink audit to find links that can be harmful, such links come from spam comments or are too packed with keywords.
Google Search Console: Alerts you to any manual actions or penalties, helping you check and identify potentially harmful links that should be disavowed.
You want to avoid black hat link building at all costs. Especially if you have a long-term mindset of consistently increasing your SEO traffic over time without being penalized. Contact Jeenam today to learn more about the value of link building for your business. We also help you know how to develop an effective and transparent SEO strategy.
Final Words
Black hat link building delivers quick but fleeting results that are outweighed by serious long-term risks. It is better to focus on providing value through great content and building trust and authority over time. You must adopt an ethical approach that focuses on the audience experience from day one. Focus on white hat strategy will build a solid SEO foundation for sustainable growth and success.
