It is nothing new that Google is getting more and more strict in enforcing its guidelines when it comes to. Those of Mountain View like external linking to be done in a natural way and that is why today we are going to talk about practices that do not fulfill their will, more specifically blackhat linkbuilding.
WHAT IS THE LINKBUILDING BLACK HAT?
Black hat link building consists of trying to improve the search engine positioning of a web page using techniques to achieve links of questionable ethics, or that contradict Google’s guidelines.
For this, several methodologies can be used that, if you carry them out regularly, will surely lead to you losing a large volume of traffic and that will sometimes be very difficult to raise.
It is not advisable to follow this type of technique, so we are going to leave you a list of black hat link building practices that you should not carry out.
BLACK HAT LINKBUILDING PRACTICES TO AVOID
Exchange of links through a network of blogs
This practice It consists of creating a series of blogs and exchanging links between them in order to add the authority of the same or another web page. It is very easy for Google to detect if, in a systematic way, a website creates a link pointing to another and this other in turn does the same pointing to the first.
Also, if the blog network is hosted on the same hosting, all the websites will share the same IP address, which will only make things easier for Google to penalize you.
This blackhat link building practice is widely used as well as dangerous. Although it is not necessary to set up a network of blogs to break the guidelines, it is enough to exchange links on a recurring basis with any website, whether it belongs to you or not.
A real example was the case of “My Blog Guest”, which was penalized in March 2014 for using this type of action.
Buy links indiscriminately
Buying links “crazy” without any criteria can have disastrous consequences for your website. Getting a large number of links in a very short time is a clear signal to the Google algorithm that you are buying links and therefore violating their directives.. The thing will get worse if, instead of buying these links on several web pages, you always do it on one or a very small number of them.
Using the same in all backlinks will also make it easier to detect this type of practice. As if this were not enough, you will also have to be careful with the purchase of links at a “knockdown price”, since their low price will make everyone want that link and, the more people have said link, the more the linkjuice will be dispersed and will have less value. This is a waste of time and money in the long run.
Another risk of a black hat link building strategy of buying links without any criteria is the probability of getting low-quality backlinks on untrustworthy sites that are penalized (link farms being their maximum expression), or with the file blocked. .
The most notorious case of a website penalized for this type of practice was that of “interflora” which, in 2013, went from one day to the next from having numerous keywords positioned in the first place to not even appearing for the brand name in the Google search engine. It literally disappeared from the internet.
His strategy consisted of sending bouquets of flowers the days before Valentine’s Day to a multitude of bloggers in exchange for links. That is, they were buying the links. The penalty lasted 2 endless weeks in which they lost a huge amount of traffic, as can be seen in the following graph.
But “Interflora”, although it was the one that had the most repercussion, is not the only case, much less, of penalties for this type of practice. Even Google itself has sometimes penalized its products, as happened in its day with “Chrome” when trying to improve its positioning with these techniques.
Sell links in bulk
Just like shopping, the indiscriminate sale of links is also a form of black hat link building, as he could verify in his own meat “Forbes”. In 2011, this well-known website dedicated to the business world had no problem carrying out this practice despite Google’s warnings and, therefore, was penalized. They went to great lengths to remove the links they sold but still forgot to remove a handful of them.
User generated content spam “UGC spam”
User-generated content is content that has been naturally created and shared by users themselves.without any financial compensation. This is totally normal and good practice. what is not accepted by Google’s guidelines is generating spam through it.
An example of creating spam through this type of action was the one carried out by the “Mozilla” website in April 2013. What happened is that they had configured their blog to auto-accept all comments, which quickly caused a massive spam that resulted in a lot of poor quality links.
Google detected that the website had enough quality not to have carried out all these actions manually and applied a penalty. Mozilla quickly moved tab removing the pages that contained spam and Google withdrew the penalty.
Abuse of guest participation on another blog
Although the so-called “guest blogging” is a normalized and widespread practice within SEO, we must always be careful with the number of links that we leave pointing to our website in the posts.
It is because of that participating as a guest in the same blog, generating links very frequently and using the same anchor text will make Google suspect that this activity is not being natural and may decide to impose a penalty on you.
Getting links using automatic generation tools
There are certain tools that, if configured specifically, can be used to automatically generate hundreds of links all over the Internet.
This is arguably the most dangerous black hat link building technique of all the ones we have talked about and should not be used under any circumstances, unless you want to receive a direct penalty from the almighty Google.
Use of obsolete media and spam:
With these practices we refer to leaving links in certain spaces that are not of quality and that Google hardly values anymore and, furthermore, to do it in an inappropriate way: Basically doing spam pure and simple.
Examples of this are the use of directories without any criteria, viralizing infographics without quality text or commenting on blogs and forums in a massive way and on those that have nothing to do with your topic. All this, of course, leaving the relevant links pointing to your website.
A real case of penalization for this type of technique was that of “Halifax Bank”, which dedicated itself to spamming directories, widgets, advertisements, infographics and other media and Google ended up hunting them down.
And with this we finish our list of black hat link building techniques that you should not do if you do not want to be penalized. If you liked it or know more techniques of the dark side, do not hesitate to leave a comment. Until next time!
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