There are many techniques out there to draw attention to your website and increase its rankings, but black hatting it is definitely to be avoided.

Sometimes black hat is actually unavoidable because you don’t know it’s going on. You have to be especially careful and observant of your site to ensure it’s not happening.

What is “black hat”? Black hat SEO is a bag of tricks to bring traffic into your website, that actually damages your site. There are many out there you yourself can avoid knowingly, but there are others out there that you may overlook, like not linking to a spammy website. However, something like this can still slip through the gaps if you yourself are not directly maintaining your site. This is not to say you should be there for every moment of your site, but you should be paying attention.

Here are a couple negatives to keep an eye on, according to Patrick Hare’s article about Black Hat SEO:

  • Stuffing Keywords - Keyword stuffing is a bad idea. When popular search words are repeated several times (usually hundreds or thousands) so that search engines would see them. They’ll notice you all right, but not in a good way. They don’t like that.
  • Sneaky Hidden Text - Hidden text is when you purposely hide text from the people yet keep it visible for the search engines. Making the text the same color as the background is one method, and search engines often notice when you’re sneaking around, and punish you accordingly.

Here are some more techniques that are simply not good practice:

  • Duplicating Content - This sounds like an obvious one, but if you are just thinking about not reproducing somebody else’s content and are duplicating your own content, you’re doing just as much damage. Hare talks about people owning more than one domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.) and putting the exact same content on all of them. Search engines only like getting duplicate information from one source, and there’s no telling which one it will take to. Do not duplicate even your own work, your rankings will slip away.
  • Purchasing Links From Bad Sites - Spammy sites are simply sites you want to steer clear of. There’s nothing, I repeat nothing good that comes out of them… except maybe learning what not to do. Buying links from them will send little red flags up in search engines, especially since most of them will be linked through identical anchor text (the words linked to your site).
  • Link Farming - Also known as Spamdexing. Your site may end up in a link farm if you’re not careful, which will also damage your site. This is a group of websites all linked to one another in one big crazy web circle. However, there are websites out there you can selectively choose which ones you’re linked to and are linked to you, and those are not bad.

There are so many different methods out there for roping in readers and customers, but you have to be careful what you’re looking into or signing up for. Be sure to study everything, and if you’ve had a bunch of people managing your site, you may want to look into where your links are going and where they’re coming from. You don’t want to make one silly mistake and end up destroying all of your hard work because you get black listed from black hatting. Just remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it just might be (so do your research).

Good luck!