How To Spot A Spam Website! 8 Common And Easy Ways To Identify Black Hat Seo

By Author: Ira Sharma
Total Articles: 1
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Knowing whether a website is spam or genuine is very important for both the internet users and SEO professionals.
Many times you open a link or visit a website and get the feeling that something is not right. Visiting such websites may cost you your money, privacy or a whole system hack.
Looking from the perspective of a website owner it leaves bad impact on your customer, spoils your business’s reputation or could get your company in debt.
The ones who are working for someone else’s website they too need to keep in mind the fraudulent they might come across before they put in their time and energy on working for one.
There are few ways by which you can avoid such threatening situations and save yourself from a major loss. Let’s understand the concept in simple words.
1) Redirecting – If a website is taking you to a shady website and not where you intend to, take this as alarm and leave as soon as possible.

2) Doorway or gateway pages – If clicking a button on a website leads you to another fraudulent website’s payment gateway or the submit button does not work. It might ...
... not be technical glitch but a spam. Close it.

3) Mirroring – Never download an official website from unethical sources. You may find the website you are looking for but that will turn out to be the exact replica of the original one that exist only to grab your money.

4) Cloaking – Commonly known as Digital arrest. If you enter a link or website and are not able to get out of it. Neither you can close the link nor your phone or laptop. That’s ransomware attack. Disconnect or power off your device right away though you may still lose your data once you get back to it.

Above mentioned pointers are to warn general population. Now if we get into the depth of it and look from technical side, there are few more ways which needs to be understood from the perspective of SEO executive.
Those who have read till here, you might have also heard terms like:
White Hat SEO – include ethical ways to increase ranking of a website.
Black Hat SEO – include unethical ways to increase ranking of a website. Also done to ask for ransom money from people as mentioned earlier.
Grey Hat SEO – include applying techniques of both Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO to strengthen security of a website against unethical hackers.
Getting back to Black Hat SEO, lets know a few more techniques that goes at the backend of a website.

5) Spamdexing¬- Unfair segregation of data in a spam website in order to rapidly increase visibility of the website in a very short span of time. This will give faster visibility and ranking but won’t last long.

6)Attempted ranking – As the name suggest, increasing the ranking of a website illegally is attempted ranking. This will lead to permanent deletion of your link or the website you are working on.

7) Hidden text – Adding invisible text in the “no title” or the “comment” section of a website. This increases overall keywords beyond set limit. Done to fast forward ranking and visibility of own website and to undermine opponent’s website. Later leads to disappearance of your website.

8) Keyword stuffing- Fitting a lot of keywords in the website that does not match the standard criteria causes crowding and ultimately leading to withdrawal of your website forever. Though it shortly helps in gaining good number of customers by increasing both ranking and visibility.

This winds up all the majorly applied unethical techniques for a quick fix of a website which no doubt gives faster results but eventually proves to be fatal for the business.

One more Black Hat SEO technique I would like to add here is Page Hijacking. Not commonly used but if done it gives whole control of your website to the other party. Done only on very popular websites in return for hefty amount of money.

This concludes that all the Black Hat SEO techniques are tempting shortcuts which u need you avoid at any cost as a SEO professional if you don’t want a permanent brand damage and traffic loss on your website.
So let’s take wiser decisions and stay aware of misleading sites and risks of Black Hat SEO.
Also, at Mediabird Magazine we together create a trustworthy online presence for everyone who are seeking authentic information and knowledge in today’s spam world.