Confession of Black Hat SEO and Lesson for Us

Search Engine Optimization is a complex process requiring careful execution and proper skill with knowledge. Here, question is not about in house SEO or outsources the optimization for your site, but the problem is proper know how of procedure. Without proper knowledge and trying Hit & Trial method, you will definitely suffer.

But what if you hire some reputable SEO company and after some time you simply get to know that they were not executing the SEO in right direction? Some of them were using Black Hat SEO which are not long lasting and may result in banning and kicking out of search engine results.

Most of the times Black Hat SEO practices are intentional and clients do suffer.

This article is aimed to avoid such misleading SEO concepts that are the waste of time. But before we start analyzing those concepts, thanks to Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, who shared his past Black Hat SEO mistakes and in his article Biggest SEO mistakes, he also busted some other myths.

Reciprocal Links:-

Rand was using reciprocal links to get links from other sites and accepted, in start of SEOmoz Company, he fooled some webmasters by blocking outbound links by nofollow/robot.txt technique. This act may helped him in short term but he lost trust of web masters. They simply removed his links from their website and lost their trust in Rand.

Building your brand, trust and reader in blogosphere is hard earned. Honor your brand and have more trust of your readership.

Buying Links:-

Second confession is about buying links. Rand purchased links for his clients to excel SERP but we know, this is just waste of money and Google totally dislikes it. Anchor text plays vital role in link building and paid links haven’t this quality. Along with this disadvantage, relevancy and link worth plays important role. Irrelevant links are totally useless and Google understands that such link has been purchased due to difference in niche/topic of web site.

Be fair in your business and provide long term results to your clients to build huge portfolio of satisfied customers.

H1 Formatting of Keywords:-

Third mistake actually busted a myth. Before that mistake they strongly believe that keywords should be formatted with H1 so that bots can easily detect them due to emphasis and give it more weightage.

Just think about if you have a blog with 500 articles, how would you feel about editing every post and formatting keyword with H1 formatting. But thanks to Rands’ adventurous nature, he found that his H1 practice having same weightage as formatting keywords with normal text. Though, most of us still use bold formatting for keyword to make it more visible to search engines. H1 formatting is beneficial in titles and this fact is also endorsed by W3C in their article.

XML Site Maps Myth Busted:-

Practice proved that sitemaps based on XML increased indexation rate. Before this myth was busted accidentally, SEOmoz Company strongly believed in non XML based sitemaps which ultimately resulted in reduced indexation rate.

301 Redirect:-

Redirection is a tricky game. Wrong redirection will cost you in losing the traffic due to various issues like redirection of backlinks etc. I myself permanently redirected my previous domain traffic to this one and was successful and kept that site in redirection state for next Google PR update. Link by link direction will save you if you have small site.