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

Stop what you’re doing and back away from any of these content-related black hat SEO techniques.

If algorithmic changes like Google’s Penguin Update have shown website owners anything, it’s that black hat SEO techniques should be avoided. Not only are many of these techniques unethical, they can get your website penalized and really hurt your organic traffic. The following practices are detrimental to law firms and should not be used.

One of the worst black hat SEO techniques is duplicating or plagiarizing content from another website. In fact, this is one of the quickest ways to see your rankings plunge. Due to the fact that search engines are placing more of an emphasis on original content than ever before, your firm should only post content that you have created, and it should be as unique as possible.

Along with this, low-quality content and spun content are definite no-no’s. Not only will poor content hurt your rankings, but it will make people quickly leave your website and never come back in many cases. If a lawyer wrote a series of thin articles about San Jose estate planning that offered no real value, his website’s rankings would probably suffer. In terms of spun content, it revolves around using software to spin an article and basically serves as a cheap backlink. This is problematic because the content is often filled with grammatical and spelling errors that make it difficult for humans to read. If a potential client comes across spun content, they will know it, and your credibility will be lost.

In addition, going overboard with on-site over-optimization can really hurt your rankings. While it’s smart to implement some sound SEO techniques, taking it too far can get you penalized. To avoid this problem, you should cater to human readers and not simply search engines. Keeping your SEO natural should provide your audience with a more enjoyable experience and boost your ranking at the same time.