What is Black Hat SEO?
Black hat seo techniques are more trouble than they’re worth. That’s why here at Dental Design we only work withGoogle’s guidelines in mind, to get the best rankings for your website; as a company we are strictly ‘white hat’.
What is Black hat seo?
Black hat seo is any on-page or off-page practice that intends to falsely manipulate a website’s search position. There are many ways a website can do this, all of which are bad for your site, bad for search engines and ultimately bad for the user.
Here are just a few examples of Black Hat SEO no-no’s
Hidden text and links
Hiding text or links can manipulate search rankings. There are a number of different ways to hide text on a webpage, for example you could use white text on a white background, use CSS to position text off screen or behind an image, set font size to zero, or hide a link in single character, such as a full stop at the end of a paragraph.
Keyword stuffing
You should use keywords appropriately and in the proper context of the article; write for humans, not search engines. It’s important to still make sure the title tag, first paragraph and Meta description all include your specific keyword. However if your keyword density is too high and reads unnaturally, this could be a red flag.
Scraping
If you take articles from a site and republish them without rewriting any of it and without permission or a link back to the original source, it could cause a manner of duplicate content issues, and bring down the wrath of Google! That’s why having bespoke content on your website is so important, and why we have employed our very own copywriter so that each and every website we produce is personalised to your practice.
What happens if you black hat your website?
Firstly, you’ll notice a dramatic drop in your rankings- we’re talking a 4 or 5 page drop, that’s if you appear in the search results at all. You’ll also get a message in webmaster tools to notify you of a manual penalty. Manual penalties are extremely difficult to lift and you’ll need an experienced SEO manager to help. However, even once a penalty has supposedly been lifted by Google, we’ve seen a few cases where rankings never truly recover and the practice is forced to start all over again with a new website and domain name.
If you would like further information about search engine optimisation for your dental practice website, speak to a member of our team on 01202 677 277 who will be happy to advise you.
Thanks to search engine watch for the inspiration for this post
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