How would you find out the difference?

White hat SEO techniques totally obey Google’s guidelines. These guidelines are implemented to make sure that their users are getting the best relevant as well as exact information pertaining to their search keywords. With white hat techniques, you do not need to worry when Google declares improvements in the current version of their search algorithm as most of these improvements are aimed towards weeding out Search Engine Optimization techniques that game the system. White hat technique helps to rank queries in SERP and increase the domain authority and page authority of your website.

Unethical SEO techniques use tricky methods that are usually against Google’s guidelines to increase your web page’s rank in the short-term however can permanently harm your site’s online reputation when Google catches on these methods. Google can either penalize your website by dropping your rank or ban it completely.

Although unethical SEO techniques may provide you a competitive edge over those that follow the guidelines, there are many reasons why this technique can be harmful to your business. Google is constantly improving their algorithm to remove these techniques and also penalize those websites that use them.

Below are some unethical SEO methods that you need to understand and avoid:

1. Hidden Text

Some sites would place particular keywords in their sites and also cover them by matching the font color with the background. Though site visitors cannot see these covered words, Google’s algorithms can still find them. This gave some websites higher page ranks back in the day. Nowadays, these methods are turned useless since Google has figured this method and has addressed the issue.

2. Cloaking

This method used 2 different HTML addresses, one is created for the website visitor and the other was created for Google’s bot. Websites that used Adobe Flash would have the ability to do this since Google cannot see the information included in these specific websites, therefore, allowing some designers to display 2 different types of content. Therefore, site visitors will discover that the web page is displayed to them is fully irrelevant to their initial query thus spoiling the visitor experience. Google constantly intends to give high-quality communications with their search engine, in order to avoid this from occurring, they penalized websites that use this method.

3. Duplicate Content

Some web developers plagiarize posts from well-known blogs or sites hoping to drive more traffic to their own website as well as boost their web page ranking. It is generally a “copy and paste” procedure. Obviously, this outright act of thieving content is disallowed and websites that do this will undergo penalties such as lower web page ranks. Google encourages bloggers to generate original and useful content that will help the online community.

4. Rewording Content

Some try to prevent plagiarism by utilizing software application that basically modify several words from an existing blog post that is lifted from another site with synonyms. This procedure of automating and spinning content to generate an “unique” composition can lead to a disjointed and in some cases incomprehensible piece that does not give any new information.

5. Link Farms

This technique involves developing many sites and using hyperlinks that looped back to each other to fool Google into identifying it as a reliable source of information. This provides the impression that your site is popular and generates a solid interest from visitors. Google currently has the ability to discover these deceptive backlinks since it can identify that these websites usually have little to no relevance to each other. Once it determines this red flag, it can lead to a big drop on your web page ranking.

Author Bio:

Ashis Kumar is a chief editor at We Bring Ideas and founder of Web Email Extractor. He loves to share his expertise and knowledge through blogging. He helped many businesses to boost their online presence on the internet.