What Black Hat SEO Techniques Should You Avoid on LinkedIn?

Learn about 17 black hat practices you should avoid because they can give you an algorithmic or manual penalty on LinkedIn.

What Black Hat SEO Techniques Should You Avoid on LinkedIn?

Black hat SEO techniques, such as spamdexing, involve manipulating the way search engines perceive the relevance of a web page in a way that is often inconsistent with search engine guidelines. Link schemes are networks that you can pay to join, usually containing blogs, website directories, and websites that are designed to manipulate the ranking of websites in search engine results. The size and reach of these link scheme networks would increase your rankings quickly in the early days of SEO, but now this will almost certainly cause your site to be penalized. Sneaky redirects are redirects that are configured to send a visitor to a different URL than the one they initially requested.

Paid links are probably the most common black hat SEO technique that still works today. One of the illegal practices of Black Hat SEO is cloaking. Cloaking means showing different content to search engines and showing different content to users. As the name suggests, duplicate content refers to the well-known “copy and paste” content creation practice across domains and means that blocks of content copied from different sources exactly match each other or look very similar.

Search engines prefer unique content, so deliberately duplicated content across different domains is perceived as one of the worst black hat techniques. When the same results are found on Google's list, it's a clear sign of manipulation of search engine rankings and usually results in a poor user experience. Duplicate content not only affects different domains, but also one domain. However, the second case is not so serious because it is usually a sign of lack of knowledge or neglect.

Therefore, it is crucial to implement a canonical tag to indicate the original version of your article. This way, you make other copies invisible to Google robots. Article spinning is a technique similar to the problem of duplicate content (above) and is becoming increasingly popular. This is higher-level plagiarism and involves the use of special software that takes the copied source and reformulates it for later use as a “new” and unique publication.

The modification efficiently reduces the risk of being detected by any plagiarism tool. What happens when you insert the term “cloaking” into the Google search bar? You will be given a Google Knowledge result that first explains “cloaking” as a search engine technique that presents completely different content or URL to the user than to the search engine spider. In fact, this method of SEO is considered misleading because it tricks search engines to get the desired rank target keywords. In addition, it is a violation of Google's webmaster guidelines because, in most cases, it serves people with irrelevant results. By definition, keyword stuffing involves overusing the same keywords on a page to maximize its visibility and organic traffic. Keyword-packed content doesn't seem natural, so it's not easy to use.

The Unamo website optimization classifier can detect keyword stuffing on your page and warn you about its consequences. Discover 5 ways to create content that can be found without keyword stuffing. Google strongly penalizes black hat tactics, whether done consciously or not. Here are 17 black hat practices you should avoid because they can give you an algorithmic or manual penalty: If you've been adding footer links with commercial anchor text at scale to manipulate results, it's likely that Google can identify them and penalize you for it; they used to be much more prevalent in the 90s and early 2000s; many SEO teams overuse keywords in one-page content just to get a higher ranking; inserting invisible text; buying traffic; using JavaScript to redirect users; using link schemes; article spinning; keyword stuffing; sneaky redirects; duplicate content; cloaking; etc. I agree with almost all of your points. But there are definitely places for paid links and that kind, as long as they're not too finished and working with natural SEO, you're going to be good and it can REALLY help.

It can sometimes take years to create the authority needed for good ranking. And while there may be short-term successes with black hat SEO, it can ultimately lead to your website being banned from Google and other search engines. Black hat SEO refers to those marketers who manipulate best practice techniques to essentially 'cheat' the system. Each search engine has algorithms that are used to penalize the use of black hat SEO, which helps reduce the amount of spam produced in response to a query.

Kendra Ursua
Kendra Ursua

Webaholic. Unapologetic social mediaholic. Incurable music fan. Hardcore twitter enthusiast. Evil beeraholic.