This exposes its site to the possibility of being heavily penalized by the search engines themselves. Google, like other companies that base their business on web engines, are constantly looking for solutions to combat the application of unorthodox techniques. Putting techniques in place to trick the bots, even if unintentionally, can lead to heavy penalties in terms of position in the SERPs if not even the complete cancellation of the site from search engines. In this article, to further discourage the use of this practice, this time intended as intentionally applied, we report some of the SEO techniques that, following the evolution of Google & Co algorithms, are now completely ineffective and easily recognizable.

1) Massive comments on blogs and forums

Until recently a very used and famous technique of Black Hat SEO was to comment massively on all the blogs in the sector, inserting in the comment the link to the page (or pages) of which you wanted to favor the positioning. Automatic content creation tools were often used.

1 1) Massive comments on blogs and forums2 2) Desert scraping3 3) Link injection4 4) Cloaking5 There is no magic wand: content SEO techniques must be constantly updated

The technique has now become useless both because the same blog and forum administrators have activated the “nofollow” tag on the links inserted by users (nofollow instructs the bot not to index the destination site when it encounters a link on the page), and because many positioning algorithms have now lowered the interest on this type of references. Surely, however, leaving references to your site on blogs and industry forums, in a non-massive way, can still have its advantages.

2) Desert scraping

It is a technique that consists of purchasing, on platforms dedicated to this purpose, expired and never renewed domains that deal with topics relevant to the site to be positioned. On these sites a redirect 301 is then inserted towards the pages to be pushed so as to acquire all the backlinks of the original site.

This technique should be avoided for the following reasons

1.search engines are now specialized in identifying “suspect” redirects 2. you risk buying expired domains where sites penalized by search engines were hosted 3. you risk buying expired domains that had a poor quality backlink profile If you do not overdo it with purchases (in terms of quantity), to the point of attracting the attention of the teams specialized in finding the sites that Black Hat SEO applied, there are special tools, such as Majestic SEO, which allow you to check the status of a non-renewed domain and the quality of its backlinks .

A very pushy technique that consists of hacking authoritative sites by injecting backlinks to the site whose positioning you want to push. It is a technique that requires, thanks to the use of automatic tools, little effort in terms of time and money. Why avoid this technique? First of all, because hacking other people’s sites as well as being terribly unethical is illegal. Furthermore, learning to hack a site costs effort, study and effort; if you want to turn to a “professional”, a hacker costs a lot. Not to mention the fact that the most authoritative (and most targeted) sites are equipped with appropriate tools to recognize such activities. In this case, in addition to the penalties of search engines, any legal action taken by the damaged sites must also be taken into consideration.

4) Cloaking

It consists of creating a page dedicated to search engine bots that has completely different content than the page that will then be shown to the human user. The server recognizes the bot, distinguishing it from a human navigator, and returns a special page. A practical example: serving the bot a “Disney content” page and the user an “adult content” page. The techniques for identifying the bot are generally based on user-agent or IP address. This technique should be avoided because it is very monitored by the security teams that work on the various search engines. Google, in particular, is at the forefront in the fight against sites that apply this technique.

There is no magic

wand: content SEO techniques must be constantly updated

The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a set of rules that governs the way our website is among the search engine results. The various search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, AltaVista,) scan and analyze the thousands and thousands of web pages using bots, or automatic and well-defined algorithms , which index them and determine their positioning in their SERP ( Search Engine Result Page ). The guidelines to get a good ranking are really many and, considering also the ruthless competition, as well as the time it takes for the bots to analyze the thousands and thousands of Internet pages, it makes sure that getting a certain positioning is not easy, it is not immediate (it can take months, if not years) and requires you to review the contents, keywords and meta-information of your pages over and over again over time