Which SEO techniques should be avoided in 2022?

Search engine optimization is an essential digital marketing strategy that can greatly boost a business brand, draw massive traffic to your website and increase sales. SEO requires hard work, time, and dedication. However, these are not wording some business owners want to hear, and as such, they will do just about anything to boost their site’s performance which includes dabbling in shady SEO techniques. Such techniques are referred to as black hat SEO, they are techniques banned by search engines.

Some see black hat SEO as a shortcut to improving their rankings and visibility on search engines. Such thinking can greatly hurt your website more than it can help it. Engaging in black hat techniques can get your site greatly penalized, banned, or become totally excluded from search engine result pages (SERPs). Have you been involved in any unethical SEO practices lately? Well, it might be possible to engage in bad SEO practices without even knowing it. Hence, in today’s article, I’ll be showing you some SEO practices you should never engage in.

What is Black hat SEO?

Black hat SEO are set practices and techniques that go against the guidelines of Google and other search engines. These techniques are used by some business owners to get higher search result rankings. They do not care about searchers’ query or intent, they only care about cheating the system to get better rankings. You should note that using such practices continuously will always end up with drastic penalties from search engines.

Search engines are continuously improving their ability to detect these unscrupulous practices. It is best to avoid such practices. Black hat techniques include; Cloaking, Keyword stuffing, links, etc. Rather than getting yourself involved in black hat SEO, why not get some SEO experts like the Sydney based SEO experts to carry out white hat SEO techniques on your website? That way you can avoid being banned or facing some serious penalties due to the use of bad SEO techniques.

Which SEO techniques should be avoided?

Practically all black hat SEO techniques and techniques that aim at deceiving search engines should be avoided. Let’s take a look at some of these techniques.

1. Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the practice of filling your blog content with irrelevant keywords, in an attempt to manipulate the page rankings. It makes your content difficult to read and creates a bad user experience.

2. Cloaking

Cloaking deceptive technique, where users are shown a piece of content, and a different piece of content is shown to search engines. Websites use this technique to rank for different varieties of keywords irrelevant to their content.

3. Paid links

Buying and selling of links has been strictly banned by Google and other search engines. Getting paid links on your website is considered a scheme and violation of Google’s webmaster. If you have to add any paid links to your website, make sure it’s a nofollow link.

4. Sneaky redirects

Sneaky redirects is a method of redirecting users to a different URL from the one they initially intended on visiting.

5. Abusing structured data/ rich snippets

Schema is also known as structured data of snippets allows you to alter how your contents are displayed on search engine result pages (SERPs). It can help your contents stand from that of your competitors. Some websites abuse this feature by providing false information in structured data to deceive search engines.

6. Spamming

This technique involves adding links to your website in blog comments. Currently, search engines like Google have updated their algorithm to discount all links in blog comments.

7. Link farms

Link farm can be described as a collection of websites created solely for the purpose of link building. Some websites make use of link farms to inflate the number of backlinks to their website.

8. Poor quality content

This is a process of scraping content from another website either through the aid of an individual or a host. Most of these contents are of no value to searchers.