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

Want to ensure your SEO standings stay strong? Don’t make these missteps!

When attempting to catapult your law firm’s website to the top of the SERPs, it’s critical to avoid certain black hat SEO techniques. Otherwise, your SEO efforts can actually work against you and lead to your firm’s website being penalized. The following techniques should be avoided at all costs.

Cloaking and using doorway pages are perhaps some of the better known black hat SEO techniques that are nearly guaranteed to get you penalized. These techniques essentially rely on deception and take visitors to a different page other than the one they think are going to when clicking on a search engine link. Besides being underhanded, these can really hurt your rankings and should always be avoided.

Meta tag stuffing and over tagging in general can also be detrimental to your firm’s SEO campaign. If a probate attorney placed hundreds or even thousands of meta tags into his website, it would act as a red flag to Google that he was trying to manipulate its algorithm. When this happens, it can have adverse consequences that can hurt any SEO progress that has been made. Keep in mind, it’s fine to use a few relevant tags, but you should avoid going overboard or using tags that are not related to the content on the page in question — no immigration law tags on an estate planning page!

Along with this, you should be careful to only use one H1 tag per page. While it’s easy for some people to think that using multiple H1 tags is beneficial, in reality it can get you penalized. Since each page of content should only have one primary topic, it’s simply unnecessary to use more than one H1 tag.