Anyone entering the field of search engine optimization is likely to encounter questionable tactics (also known as “black hat”), or toxins, as we call them in our Periodic Table of SEO Factors.
These are shortcuts, or tricks, that might have been enough to guarantee a high ranking back in the days when engine methods were much less sophisticated. (They may even work now, at least until you get caught.) We recommend that you steer clear of these tactics, as using them could result in a penalty or ban.
Don’t worry, it’s hard to accidentally spam a search engine, and engines look for a variety of signals before deciding whether someone deserves a severe penalty. That being said, let’s talk about the don’ts.
Cl: Concealment
Showing search engine crawlers something different from what you present to users is called “cloaking” and can be used to trick users into visiting irrelevant or harmful pages.
Unlike other toxins, cloaking isn’t something that can happen by accident: it’s a deliberate attempt to manipulate search results, and if you’re caught doing it, you can expect a hefty penalty.
What about JavaScript issues? “Stealth is specifically against it Google Guidelines, but those guidelines are murky right now because of JavaScript,” says Search Engine Land’s Detlef Johnson. “The Server-Side Rendering (SSR) solution only provides this dynamically in conjunction with spider detection . When handling a Googlebot request, you can choose to do SSR, while all other requests are handled normally, delivering scripts for rendering to the browser. This is technically a concealment, but Google looks the other way because it’s aware of the intent.”
“As long as your intent isn’t suspicious, you can do that and hope you don’t get banned. It’s when you reserve content for spiders that you don’t show users that things start to cross the line,” Johnson explains.
For more information, see our articles on SEO: Cloaking and Doorway Pages.
Sf: Filled
You can assume that the more times a keyword appears on a page, the more relevant search engines will consider that page to be to the query. No. Inserting keywords more often than is natural or useful to users is called “keyword stuffing”. It’s one of the oldest spam tactics out there, and it can still get you penalized.
Don’t repeat keywords over and over again in your headers, copy, and footers, anywhere, in an attempt to improve your rankings. There is no magic formula for keyword frequency and keyword density is a myth.
Instead, focus on addressing user intent. Whether this results in a keyword occurring just a couple of times or more than a dozen times is far less important than the quality of your content and the value it provides to your audience.
Ar: Piracy
It is illegal to spoof someone else’s intellectual property (an article, song, graphic, photo, video, etc.) and pass it off as your own. However, that’s not the only reason it’s bad for SEO: users generally want the original source of content, and search engines want to provide it.
Google’s 2012 “Pirate” update targeted sites that violate copyright law. The Sites are subject to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) takedown requests. Plagiarism or hosting plagiarized or illegal content may get you removed from search results. Check your Google Search Console notifications if you suspect a DMCA takedown request has been filed against you.
Sc: Schemes
Finding backlinks is an essential aspect of SEO, but the rules change when money is involved. Paying for links that bypass link equity violates both Google i Bingguidelines, and doing so can have dire consequences for your organic visibility.
“Google could get penalized or banned, and that’s not a good situation either,” says Julie Joyce, director of operations at Link Fish Media. “Depending on the severity of the problem, it can take anywhere from a few months to a few years to get back to where you were.”
To be clear, you can pay to have an inbound link placed on another entity’s website (as would be the case with ads), but those links cannot pass link equity. Paid links must be indicated with a rel=“nofollow” or rel=“sponsored” link attribute.
Schemes aren’t just limited to buying links: large-scale guest posting services with keyword-laden anchors, link exchanges, blog spamming, and other illegal practices can also lead to penalties from search engines. search There are numerous examples of brands that have rejected attempts to manipulate search algorithms using these methods, even with Google’s involvement. If you choose to ignore Google’s rules, be prepared to have little mercy if you get caught. And don’t believe programs that tell you their paid links are undetectable. They aren’t, especially when many of those out in the cold are run by idiots.
It’s much better to see your ranking gradually increase over time than to take shortcuts and have to get back on track after a penalty.
For more information, see our articles on Link Building: Paid Links and SEO Spam.
Hi: It’s hidden
Site owners who insert keywords into their pages can also try to hide these attempts by hiding the text. Whether it’s matching the font color to the background, placing the text off-screen, reducing the font size to zero, or any other hiding method, hiding text is a violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines and may result in a penalty.
Links can also be designed to be invisible to users, which some site owners may do to visually hide paid links while trying to pass link equity. Whatever your reason, hiding elements is not something users benefit from and is unlikely to improve your SEO.
There is, however, the case of expandable content that is revealed when the user interacts with it; for example, hovering over a link within a Wikipedia article can reveal more information.
IV: intrusive
Whether the obstacle is an interstitial, a barrage of ads, or some other intrusive element, making visitors jump through hoops to find what they’re looking for can hurt your user experience as well as your organic visibility.
Often used to try to extract revenue or manipulate site metrics, this type of bad practice is what Google’s Page Layout Algorithm, also known as the Top Heavy Update, was created for.
For better or worse, interstitials are now a regular part of the mobile user experience. In 2017, Google implemented the mobile intrusive interstitial penalty to deter site owners from abusing these elements.
Most recently, Google updated its Search Quality Evaluator guidelines to address this trend, stating, “A single pop-up ad or interstitial page with a clear, easy-to-use close button isn’t too distracting , although it may not be a great user experience. However, ads that follow page scrolls or interstitial pages that require an app download can be really distracting and make the MC [main content] difficult to use.”
Not all interstitials are passive. If “used responsibly,” interstitials related to legal obligations (such as privacy or age verification), login dialogs, and other banners that use a “reasonable amount of screen space and which can be easily discarded” would not be affected by Google mobile intrusive interstitial penalty.
[Pro Tip]
“There’s a lot of talk about ‘is CTR a ranking factor? is dwell time a ranking factor?’ And it causes some people to artificially increase the time spent on the page, but for bad reasons they will load the content completely and then you click the button and it will say, “oh wait a second, time for us to load the content”, as if it took 10 seconds to call a database and create the content.
These are all tactics that are clearly designed to artificially increase dwell time. It seems very petty because this is just wasting users’ time to fulfill an SEO urban legend. But also, it is harmful to ours [search engine] users So that’s something that we definitely recommend and we reserve the right to take action if it’s really abusive.” –Frédéric Dubut, Senior Program Director at Bing
SEO Guide chapters: Home – 1: Factors – 2: Content – 3: Architecture – 4: HTML – 5: Trust – 6: Links – 7: User – 8: Toxins – 9: Emerging
