It used to be, now it's gone. What was a standard in the SEO industry a few years ago, and today is absolutely shameful and unacceptable for Google algorithms? Here are 5 black hat SEO tricks that won't help anymore today, but rather harm your website. Check what not to do in SEO in 2021.

Black hat SEO is a collection of dirty onsite and offsite licks that both SEO freelancers and SEO agencies use to seemingly improve SERP scores. "Apparently" is the keyword. In fact, Google algorithms in recent years, thanks to machine learning, really know when someone is trying to trick them.

Domains that try the following tricks (often without the awareness of the customer who simply ordered the SEO service) will be given solid filters and penalties that will be a problem in website positioning for many years. We know this because we often have to "unravel" such stories with our new clients when they previously fell victim to an SEO scam.

What to look for and what NOT to do in SEO in 2021?

These are the tricks of the biggest SEO liars. When it comes to cloaking, that is, showing different content to users and other Google robots, it will help you generate additional traffic on the website. In the end, you will pass the algorithm, which, for example, may redirect some users to you after the phrase "the cheapest Nike shoes", and in the middle of the link you will add a sale of accessories and decorations to your home. A cunning plan. But will runners looking for footwear be tempted to buy something else?

Of course, there is a percentage of the chance. However, most will come out right away. Why? Because you cheated them and believe that they won't want to come back to your site anymore. In addition, it is possible that they will add a negative review as a goodbye. From an SEO perspective, a high exit and bounce rate will lower the average session length on the page, which will negatively affect the page's rating and bring a catastrophe.

Similarly with hidden texts, i.e. hiding text. In the past, additional, unrelated to the page content, text or at least keyword packages (e.g. added with small font or white font, in HTML comments or placed under graphics) was hidden. Maybe you will bring someone to your website this way, but will this someone turn into your client? And even if the traffic generated in this way will make you temporarily earn, in a moment you will get a ban from Google and all good positions in organic search results will be damned.

Anywhere, anyhow, just to get external links; it will not pass anymore. And a few years ago, link farms were a great tool for website positioning. Today, it is Google's ruthlessly negative black hat SEO, for which penalties and filters from browser algorithms are practically inevitable.

Acquiring external links from untested sources is a huge risk for your domain.

How do you know if the link building offered to you is fake? Let the price for one link arouse your suspicions. When you want to get a link from a website with high prestige and Google ranking, e.g. through a sponsored article, the cost of such cooperation will be from several hundred to even several thousand dollars. If you get an offer in which for several dozen dollars you have to get x links pointing to your domain, something is wrong here.

This is what every sentence on our blog would look like if we wanted to use keyword stuffing. There may even be a message in it, but it reads tragically. In addition, stuffing keywords in every possible place on a subpage or landing page has been badly rated by Google for over a decade, and yet today we find marketers and copywriters who create descriptions of products, services and entries in this way. 

Enough! Unnatural multiplication of keywords must be a thing of the past. In return, give your readers and Google robots content that is truly valuable, unique, and easy to read.

Exactly. Content marketing still exists in many companies. Last blog entry from a year ago, or even a week ago, but for two / three paragraphs of text, an e-book made by a graphic designer that no one looks at anymore, product descriptions in the style of "the best solution in the market for high quality, provided by industry leaders for 20 years"…

It used to work. You could throw in everything you could, wherever you could, copied from other pages, without order and composition, without a drop of text formatting, and Google robots turned a blind eye or even pushed such websites up. It won't work today.

Even if the content is excellent, and the SEO specialist you have hired does not shirk and compromise with black hat SEO, but simply does a good job diligently, it will all be for nothing if the website or online store is not well optimized.

That is why it is worth taking an interest in SXO. It is a combination of website positioning, conversion optimization and UX and UI grinding, in line with the new expectations and indicators from Google under the name of Core Web Vitals. The quality of the website matters. Effective positioning of an archaic website that is not adapted to mobile devices is much more difficult work, and often even impossible to perform. Especially if your competitors do their homework with SXO.

So make a good competitor analysis. And for that, you need a powerful tool. Among many other tools, we have the Dedicated SEO Dashboard. An all-in-one SEO tool, which can provide you with enough information about your direct and indirect competitors.

As in life, fraud does not pay off in SEO. There are no shortcuts here. Dietary supplements alone will not make you lose weight, and certainly not make you healthy and safe.

When it comes to website positioning, instead of spending time on tricks, do regular training - take care of content, website optimization, healthy and sensible link building, both internal and external, and your SERP muscles and form will stay with you for years. Good luck!

If you need support from a personal trainer in this regard, we will be happy to help. The Semalt team is at your disposal. No black hats. Write to us and let's talk about what we can do for your brand in terms of SEO.

Black hat SEO is a collection of dirty tricks by SEO specialists who want to prove results at all costs, if only for a moment, using methods that are poorly viewed by Google and that may result in a filter or a penalty imposed by the browser.

First of all, it is worth being fair, honest with both users and Google algorithms and, most importantly, systematically working on the positioning of your domain. It is not worth investing in link farms, stuffing keywords where possible, or lying to the algorithm with hidden texts or cloaking. You can find more examples in our blog post.