Well, the wedding is over for webmasters and marketers who still use black hat techniques.
There is no mercy nowadays from Google, as they are lowering the boom on black hatters like the Federation on the Klingon Empire. Websites that used these SEO techniques are dropping like flies, left and right, and Google is playing around either. They’re using their software programs that have been constantly beefed up to penalize entire sites for as little as one spammy alt tag on a photo.
Things to stop doing immediately is to hire professional writers. Content, fresh, real content is what Google is looking for. Relevant copy and photos are the most important thing and to make sure they’re not spammy or full of keywords. Natural sounding and natural flowing copy is easy to detect nowadays as well as whether the copy was written by a human, or spun using automated programs.
If you really want a beat down from Google, try using underhanded linking procedures. Google will beat up on your website so bad, every time someone visits your site, their browsers will start bleeding. Link building will get you nothing short of being doomed. You’ll be in the purgatory of the internet and there ain’t no getting out.
Don’t even think about joining webrings. Google will bring down the house around you. It’s like all the good stuff that worked years ago that were honest, experimental, then got classified as Black Hat, and now are what gets you penalized to the point of unable to recover from. It’s very risky and calls for one to stay on top of all of Google’s changes of heart just to stay out of trouble.
Cloaking should be penalized and Google is doing just that, along with invisible text. You have to be very careful about invisible text, even if you didn’t intend to do it. Sometimes a junior staff member or boo boo on your part, might change the color of your text and make it invisible. If that happens, there’s no one at Google to hear your pleas. You’re doomed none the less.
If all this scares you, just wait, the worst is yet to read.
Remember all those doorway pages you created? Get rid of them as in fast! Google is beating the heck out of sites with multiple doorway pages that are set up only for the purposes of driving traffic to the front page of the site or to some upsell page or product on the site. This is brutal because some websites have spent considerable time and money and effort to build these pages and not make them look like cookie cutter pages, but that’s not going to be any good now. On the other hand, if the pages are taken down there may be some salvation in the error page redirection. Only time will tell if Google will penalize people for error pages.
Remember domain squatting? Where speculators would buy up domains in order to sell them to a person, persons, or companies that owned a similar name that they had trademarked? It was big business. People have made tens of millions of dollars not only selling the domains but in leasing them. Well that practice will get you slammed nowadays by Google. It’s also a form of cybersquatting or typosquatting where a letter or character in a name of a popular site is used to gobble up the error traffic of people who misspell a popular site’s name.
Those are just a few of the things that will get Google chewing you into little itty bitty pieces. Others include buying links, meta keyword stuffing, comment spamming, and fake likes and shares. Didn’t know Google knew how to do that did you? It’s soon coming to an end using Facebook and other social networking for Black Hat techniques.
So the bottom line is, be honest. Hire real competent writers and content creators, artists, and web support staff that are what they say they are. Don’t risk outsourcing for cheap labor, that is so destructive that you might as well shoot holes in your computer.
That’s the roundup. Now fix what’s wrong and don’t go Black Hat SEO.