The 3 most popular black hat SEO practices in Greece

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tedious process, requiring sufficient time to yield the desired results. On the hunting of Google's first page positions, many developers are tempted to implement black hat SEO techniques, ignoring the risk of a permanent site ban from the search engine's results. Let's examine the 3 most popular black hat SEO practices, applied in Greece today.

Bying incoming links

The acquisition of incoming links is a practice that brings quick results in improving the ranking of a website, but it is prosecuted by Google and the websites applying this technique get permanently banned. Let's look at an example of acquisition of incoming links:

Joomla is a popular Content Management System that many dynamic websites are being built with. One of Joomla's strongest advantages is its expandability, as it allows the installation of specialized extras (plugins and modules) for specific tasks. A particularly popular Joomla addon is Jmod Tweeter Display, which is powered by a Twitter account, automatically displaying the posted tweets on the content of a website.The great popularity of this module is due to the fact that it's offered free of charge. The developer of the module warns users that a backlink to his website is displayed on the bottom of the module. However, during the past weeks, the backlink displayed on the module does not lead to the developer's website – as the warning declares – but to a ...Greek web design company. This company "managed" - in a few weeks time – to appear among the first search result positions on Google, for the relevant term. Apparently, the developer of module has decided to take advantage of the module's popularity and make some extra income by selling backlinks to whomever is interested. This is clearly a black hat SEO practice that will not go unnoticed by Google.

A brief warning to the users of this module : you should stop using Jmod Tweeter Display immediately. Otherwise, your website risks to get permanently banned from Google, due to the use of black hat SEO techniques.

Hidden backlinks

Incorporating hidden links to a website is an endearing black hat SEO practice for many Greek website developers. Hiding links can be done in several ways, for example by forming a very small size of the link's text, or even coloring the link's text at the background color of a website. Hidden links contribute significantly to a website's ranking improvement, but are a black hat SEO technique, with the known consequences...

Keyword stuffing

The third most popular bad SEO practice that occurs in plenty of Greek websites is keyword stuffing among the content, even in the title and the meta-description of a web page. People applying this practice tend to believe that this will achieve good ranking for all incorporated keywords. Unfortunately, they are unaware of the fact that the content of a website is aimed at humans and not at the search engines. Keyword stuffing should be avoided at all times, as it reduces the credibility of the website and suggests ignorance of the basic SEO criterion, which is none other than the quality of the website's content.