Black Hat Content Marketing May Seem Tempting, But It’s Riskier Than You Realize

It’s an unfortunate but unavoidable part of the times that sketchy SEO content marketing practices still run rampant, and they often go undetected by Googlebots for a long time, allowing the shadier websites to get ahead of legitimate businesses. This can be downright frustrating for businesses that are trying to run a clean search engine marketing campaign, even to the point where these businesses might decide to try out some black hat content marketing techniques themselves.

Since good content marketing can increase revenue by as much as 40%, it’s hard to sit back and watch other businesses get away with these black-hat techniques. But it’s important to keep in mind that search engine marketing and optimization isn’t a race, and getting to that top-ranking spot in just a couple weeks doesn’t mean that your SEO marketing campaign is working.

When in doubt, no matter how much you may be tempted, try to avoid these common — and deceptive — black hat SEO strategies, which will almost certainly result in Google penalizations:

1. 1. Paying for links: Link juice drives up keyword rankings — there’s no doubt about it. But Google considers this to be a link scheme, and if you’re found using an SEO service that provides links for payment, your website could be penalized. How does Google penalize? It can remove your website completely from search results.

1. 1. Selling your links: This is just a reversal of the point above. Backlinks are beneficial, but not when you sell them.

1. 1. Placing content in low-quality directories: There are countless websites that exist merely for the purpose of existing, and it’s not hard to find one of these websites and buy space for content. But be warned — these websites tend to have low domain authority (DA), which doesn’t help your website at all.

1. 1. Keyword stuffing: This is the term for squeezing in a bunch of keywords, usually awkward ones that don’t really make sense grammatically, in order to rank quickly on those terms. Keyword stuffing used to work; it really does not work anymore.

1. Article-spinning: This is where you take an existing article and re-post it on your website — often with a different title or meta description, and a cited source to avoid legal problems. Although the intention may be pure, re-posting exact articles is risky because this will be flagged as duplicate content.

With over 141,400 professionals working in the website development and content marketing industry, you don’t have to settle for black hat techniques. In fact, approximately 70% of marketers have admitted that SEO-related optimization lessons have helped them master other types of marketing, both on the web and off, making it an even better investment than can be measured.

When it comes to SEO marketing, your business deserves better than black hat techniques!