SEO is the practice of improving one’s website visibility and ranking on organic search engine results by improving the web pages and their content. But to stay ahead of competitors, some people get into the practice of black hat SEO to boost their website’s performance. The search engines’ algorithms notice these unethical practices and then penalize the owners for their unfair acts. Sometimes, businesses hire the wrong people for their website and get penalized without even knowing. Considering this scenario, we talked to Faisal Abidi, Co-Founder of RNF Technologies, to discuss how one can identify black hat SEO scammers.
False Promises Of SEO Scammers, As Revealed By Faisal Abidi
Faisal Abidi shares that businesses are more prone to receiving SEO help emails daily, considering the demand for a boost in the website’s ranking. Faisal Abidi, Co-Founder of RNF Technologies and Resourcifi, receives many of them. Still, noticing their false promises and techniques makes it easy to not fall for these SEO scams. Let’s discuss the methods and baits used by SEO scammers to attract more customers.
- Guaranteed Page 1 Ranking On Search Engine
It is the most common strategy scammers adopt to gain your attention. Everyone understands the importance of web site’s ranking on the first page, but it’s not something that any company can guarantee. Everyone can work on content optimization, regular updating, quality, page loading time, images, and tags, and spend time and money on digital marketing for years to be on page one. Still, no one can guarantee such a thing!
If someone offers you page 1 ranking in less money and time, they are bluffing you or using black hat SEO strategies.
- Secret Formulas For High Ranking
No one exactly knows the google algorithm for ranking websites. Every digital marketer tries to boost your website’s ranking using different SEO strategies and practices. Usually, white hat SEO marketers reveal their strategy to the client so they don’t over-expect the digital marketers. At the same time, black hat SEO scammers try to hide their process and promise a higher ranking. Now, you know what they are doing to fulfilling their fake promises.
- Instant Link Building Scams
Some scammers offer hundreds of links to your website. But, again, is it of any use? No! Faisal Abidi, Co-Founder of RNF Technologies, highlights how these multiple links are of no use as google focuses on quality over quantity of the backlinks. Links from unrelated sources will not boost your website’s ranking; instead, they harm its ranking as it would be considered a paid backlink and penalize the website’s owner. So, you would be paying for these links to the scammers and be penalized by google for such practices. It doesn’t sound like a good idea.
- Submission To Hundreds Of Seach Engines
Do you think submitting your website to hundreds of search engines is relevant when the US only uses three? Scammers try to oversell their services by claiming such things. Also, when you check their search engine list, you will find many fake or irrelevant search engines on the list.
- Free Trials Scam
No genuine digital marketing company will offer free services to their clients as it’s a time-demanding and energy-consuming process. Why would a company do it for free unless they gain something from it? Many organizations reported malware injection into their websites. As this free trial also demands your admin access and sometimes credit card details. So, scammers take advantage of this free trial scam to access your domains and cards.
- Attempt To Overtake Your Domain
As we discussed, owners must give away the website’s credentials to boost their website’s ranking and visibility. It’s okay if the SEO marketers are reliable, but if not, they try to take advantage of this situation and overtake one’s domain. Your domain has everything you need and aspires for your company, and creating a new one with all those features would demand more time and money from you. Verify twice before sharing your crucial information with any digital marketing company.
Black Hat SEO Practices
Let’s explore some practices scammers use to boost your website’s ranking.
- Keyword Stuffing
Everyone knows the importance of keywords in boosting the website’s ranking and visibility. But, again, using them in excess is not a recommendation, and Google detects this extra keyword stuffing in your content, negatively affecting your ranking.
- Cloaking
Cloaking is another black hat SEO practice that shows different content to users and search engines. This is done to make content rank for various terms irrelevant to their content. It includes showing keywords to the crawlers but not to the users, similarly displaying different forms of media to the users but only HTML text to search engines. It’s like manipulating the crawlers with the content. Tailoring the content is acceptable as long as there is no misguidance for the crawlers.
- Poor Content Quality
Duplicating content from other websites was common, but now search engines can easily detect this duplicate content. Now, scammers try to include invisible keywords in the content using the same color as the background color. Although the keyword appears to the users, there is no relevant information.
- Abusing Structured Data
With structured data, one can change the appearance of their data on search engines, which helps in making your content stand out from other websites. One can add structured data to a page displaying a podcast, recipe, or book, among other products and services. Again, black hat SEO scammers provide invalid information on the structured data to mislead the users and crawlers. Like, they were giving a 5-star ranking from a fake review site is risky as google encourages users to report such websites.
Final Thoughts
These are a few of the most common practices and strategies scammers use to boost your website’s ranking. But staying cautious and alert while giving away your website’s and personal information to digital marketers is a crucial step to safeguard yourself from such black hat SEO scammers. Take time to select your digital marketing team as it will significantly impact your business, suggests Faisal Abidi, Co-Founder of RNF Technologies.