The Unethical Side To SEO

When getting into SEO as a marketing strategy, some choose to do it themselves while others prefer a professional content marketer. Both options are worth exploring if at all the give positive results and stick to the ethics. Before you get into SEO marketing, you need to know that it also as an unethical side, which could be rewarding in the short-term but very risky and damaging.

When dealing in SEO there are two sides to how you use it to increase your website’s traffic. The two tactics for SEO, which are White Hat and Unethical.

The Difference Between The Two SEO Tactics

It all comes down with how the SEO adheres to Google’s’ guidelines and rules. White hats are like the good developers who follow rules and use SEO as it should. When placing your keywords you need to ensure that they do not make unnecessary inconveniences to your website visitors and ruin their experience. With white hats, the aim is to use keywords in the right positions in order to provide credible and accurate information. In this case, Google algorithm changes do not affect their performance or ranking but instead seek to favor them by weeding out the unethical SEO users.

So, who are the unethical SEO marketers? These content developers use keywords fraudulently to increase their website traffic. The internet is a large place and there are all sorts of sites good and bad. In order to take a shortcut towards increased website traffic, many take the unethical route in SEO marketing. By this, they do not follow the guidelines and deliberately mislead search engine users into clicking on their websites. By using keywords inappropriately, the unethical users trick Google bots into giving them higher ranks and thus increase their website’s traffic.

There are many unethical uses of keywords for the SEO marketing strategy. For the most cases, Google algorithm always catches up with the tactics and there are always heavy penalties to pay for them. Below are some unethical tactics that any SEO marketer should avoid.

1. Camouflaged/Invisible Text

This trick includes using keywords and matching the text color with the background. While the visitors may not notice, the embedded text Google algorithms picked it up and thus the website increased its rankings. Rankings increase the website’s traffic since they show up on more search results and thus get more visitors.

Google SERP ranks websites by their use of keywords. As a user keys in a keyword in order to get certain information, Google Search Console uses spiders to look for websites, which contain the particular keywords. This means that if a website embeds a keyword in their content the Google algorithm will consider it a hit and show it on the results. After Google correcting the issue with its algorithms, it is now ineffective.

2. Cloaking Links

In the past, Google bots could not read HTML text on sites that used Adobe Flash plugins. This meant that if the designer creates two texts were one was visible to Google bots and the other was invisible. This way they could show one thing and display another. This way the developers lured visitors who found that the content was very different from what they previously searched on Google. This aspect of cloaked text misleads the internet users and spoils their Google user experience. However, since Google tries to maximize its user experience this practice soon fell as they penalized any sites who used this trick on its users.

3. Content Plagiarism

Any online content creator knows they should never try to plagiarism content on any site on the internet. However, for those who do not know, this offense could get your site penalized and it would dip your rankings. When a website developer uses the “copy and pastes” trick in a bid to get more traffic into their website, they risk high penalties. Google and other search engines encourage unique and original content from all sites and developers, which is why they frown upon cases of plagiarism.

4. Paraphrased Content

The internet is a huge place with all kinds of tools and programs. You can find any editing tool on the internet including a paraphrasing editor. However, most paraphrasing tools are programs that do not really change the grammatical flow but merely change the selection of words. While some unethical SEO marketers plagiarize, others use the paraphrasing tools on the internet to change certain words in the text. This often results in incomprehensible and a broken flow of the content. This content rarely makes sense and might even not provide any valuable information on its subject matter.

5. Inter-Looped Links

In this case, the unethical user creates a series of interconnected links that lead to the same website. This practice creates the impression that the website is trustworthy and provides authoritative content. It all hangs on the reason that Google provides better rankings for websites, which receive more backlinks from other websites. The more backlinks a website has from other sites the more authoritative it seems and it, therefore, gets better rankings.

Google is however aware of this trick and if they check the backlinks and find that the two sites have to relation then it may award you heavy penalties. Often the sites that engage in this practice get a huge drop in their rankings from which they rarely recover.

Unethical SEO strategies not only spoil the visitor’s experiences it also lands you in trouble and dunks your rankings. When you consider the short-term gain involved in unethical tactics against the disadvantages earned, you will find it is not worth it. Every online content producer, blogger, or digital marketer should know better than use unethical SEO tactics to increase their traffic from Google. Additionally, Google is always checking the platform for fraudulent users and it eventually catches up to the tricksters. If you plan to create an online brand that will last for long after its inception, unethical SEO is one way to kill the plan.