If you're considering using black hat SEO tactics, it's important to understand the potential consequences. Google can detect when websites are using unethical SEO practices and will impose a penalty. This penalty can cause your website's ranking to drop or, in the worst case, be completely removed from search engine results. The worst-case scenario of using black hat SEO is that your website is permanently removed from search engines.
This can result in a decrease in website traffic of up to 94%. Even if you fix the problem and request a reindexing, it's likely that your website will rank very low in the results. Therefore, it's best to avoid unethical SEO practices and only use tactics that Google approves. Google Hummingbird is an algorithm that acts as a filter to detect and penalize websites that violate search engine rules. If you choose to use black hat SEO tactics, you risk both short-term and long-term penalties.
These include the loss of ranking, the rapid removal of fragments or PAA boxes, and even being completely blacklisted by the search engine. Black hat SEO tactics may seem appealing to SEO newbies, but they can be very detrimental to the long-term ranking status of your website if discovered. These tactics include adding invisible text to home pages, participating in link schemes, and copying and pasting someone else's content without making any effort to remove it. Companies that focus on pursuing the algorithm as an SEO strategy will be particularly affected by these sanctions. For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that may not have a full-time SEO expert among their employees, it can be difficult to detect questionable Black Hat SEO practices.
A company's investment in Black Hat SEO is not profitable; it may work in the short term, but over time it will be an investment of money and time lost thanks to sanctions. If you want to ensure that your website is not penalized by Google, it's important to only use white hat strategies. This means focusing on helping your audience solve problems and being the best possible online resource. It also means avoiding link padding, even in the footer, as this is considered a black-hat SEO tactic. Finally, be careful with the wording of your website as Google can impose algorithmic penalties at the keyword level.
