Black Hat SEO Techniques That Can Damage Your Rankings, Part One

Stay away from these black hat techniques for the health of your SEO campaign.

While SEO plays a critical role in getting your law firm’s website ranked highly in search engines, it only works if you’re doing it the right way. This means staying clear of underhanded black hat SEO techniques and sticking with white hat ones instead. Here are some techniques that can hurt your rankings and that you should stay away from.

One of the most common problems people run into is trying to build too many back links too fast. Since SEO is a gradual process that takes time, your firm shouldn’t be overly concerned with building a multitude of links over night. In fact, you’re usually better off when you steadily build high-quality links from reputable sites over time.

Another link generation strategy to avoid is paying for low-quality spam links. Often, you will see online advertisements that will give you thousands of links for a few dollars. Even though this may sound like a good deal, Google is likely to penalize you in a hurry, and your rankings can suffer.

Besides this, your firm should stay away from links being placed on foreign language websites. Relevancy is key for link building, and if no one coming to your website through these links can read your content then the link is worthless at best and a black spot on your reputation at worst. If a firm of Chicago malpractice attorneys used this technique, it’s likely that its rankings would decline short term, and it could see even more penalties over time.

In addition, participating in link exchanges can really damage your firm’s rankings. The majority of these platforms rely on websites exchanging links with one another that are often irrelevant and low quality. Even though this technique is a quick way to generate links, it tends to do more harm than good and can put a damper on your long term SEO efforts.

Check back next week for part two of this series to learn more about negative black hat techniques to avoid!