• It’s true what they say about getting penalized by Google for practicing Black Hat SEO techniques.
• The most important part about search engine optimization is keeping up-to-date with the rules created by search engines.
• Search engines can penalize you for practicing certain outdated methods of keyword ranking. The techniques are unethical and your ranking can drop down drastically for being ignorant about these practices.

Equip yourself with trending and up-to-date information when it comes to SEO

The objective of practicing ethical white hat search engine optimizing is to attract visitors to your website in the right way. Build you brand and help it grow. Google is constantly updating it’s algorithms especially to demotivate unethical SEO practices and to discover the truth about gray hat SEO practices - the wrong practices that are still unknown to search engines. We’ve come up with four outdated search engine optimization techniques that used to be commonly practiced and are now considered to be a threat to the growth of a website.

Google can penalize your website by bringing down the ranking drastically in no-time if you’ve been caught following these outdated SEO practices:

1. Gaming by Hiding: For them who are hiding keywords and links at the bottom of their pages by making it look like the same color of the page, or pasting the keywords on the background so that search engines cannot see it, this technique used to work, but doesn’t work anymore.

Search engine spiders are now well aware of this technique and immediately penalize the site that practices this particular method of ranking high really fast.

According to Google Search Console doing the following is hiding texts and links on your website:

• Using a text color that same as the background.
• Situating the text right behind a video or an image.
• Reducing the size of the font to zero.
• Using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to position the text off-screen.
• Hiding links behind full-stops, coma’s, hyphens, and other such small characters.

These things might sound like a great idea, but remember, we picked these points from Google’s guidelines, which means, “Google knows”.

2. Keyword Stuffing - The Disease: This is going to kill your site. Google will not only push down your ranking, but might even remove your website altogether from their SERP (Search Engine Result Page). You can add keywords to your content but no you cannot place them all over your content.

DO NOT STUFF KEYWORDS

Do you want your visitors to re-visit? Do you want Google to recognize you as an ethical player? Do you want buyers to trust your website, well if you do want all of these things you will not stuff keywords in your website.

There is a natural way of adding keywords to your content. Look at this blog: https://www.digi-markets.com/blog/top-5-digital-marketing-tips-for-startsups-in-2019-20.html The main keyword used is Search Engine Optimization. Look at how naturally it has been used and how interesting the read is. Make it look like you do not need to insert them all over the content because the write-up is a brilliant piece of work. Trying to manipulate Google is going to cost you, if you’re found doing that.

You may want to use a keyword suggestion tool to find the right keywords to use. There are several excellent tools to help you with highly relevant traffic-driving keywords. You enter a seed keywords and you have the results in a matter of seconds.

3. Using Old, Stale and Copied Content: You see there is a reason why people hire professional content curators with an ability to be creative with the content that they generate. Be it copywriting or creative writing, Google gives content the highest priority when it comes to factors that contribute to ranking of a website on the engines.

Your Visitors Trust You, Do Not Deceive Them with Spammy Content

Rule of Thumb - Work on your Content!

Avoid wrong keyword placement as mentioned above, and try to give your visitors what they came looking for, to your website. Create content with a vision to be read by millions, and to be talked about on social media. Engage, engage and engage, but do it the right way, by working on content freshness, uniqueness and originality.

Avoid the following to create SEO-friendly unique content for your website

• Content Spinning or automatically generated content.
• Participating in link schemes, cloaking, sneaky redirects and hidden keywords.
• Keywords stuffing and use of irrelevant keywords.
• Affiliate marketing by using false information and spammy content.

Keep the content fresh, updated and relevant to the topic and keywords.

4. Cloaking Your Website: You are being dishonest to search engine spiders and they are not going to like that. What you show search engines is different from what your users experience. This is majorly done by spammers and websites that have little to no chance of ranking on SERPs.

Search engine crawlers are eventually going to find you and penalize you for this. This is pure evil, it’s like you typed in “Adidas Shoes” on the search bar and the engine sent you to a site full of fake medicinal oils from the Amazon forest. SEO experts are aware of how to cloak but they do not follow it anymore as it would question their professionalism.

CLOAKING IS A VIOLATION OF GOOGLE’S RULES

Keep one only version of your website for search engines and for users. Users should also be able to differentiate between the content of the website and the affiliate marketing ads(if any). Make your pages content accessible by using Google recommended methods.

For JavaScript, you can place the content from the JS in a tag and make sure the contents are same as what’s contained in the JS. The content should also be shown to users who do not have JS enabled in their browsers. For videos, you may use descriptive texts or provide transcripts and follow certain Google instructions for publishing video. (Hyperlink: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156442)

For images, you may use alt attribute for text describing it. Use a caption if possible.

There are several tools available online to check the status of cloaking on a website. Prevent your website from getting penalized by Google. If your site is hacked or cloaked without your knowledge we can help you fix it without hurting your rankings.

Thanks for reading!