Online visibility has always been the key to survive in the digital realm full of tough competition. Each business wants to appear first before potential clients. This is the reason why most of them rely on SEO strategies or, in many cases, SEO consultants. These consultants use various SEO techniques. For example, when it comes to SEO Dubai, they recommend link building and high quality, mobile-friendly websites.

If you have been researching SEO, you should know that there are many SEO companies that promise quick results in a very short time. It’s better to think twice in such cases as they may use Black Hat SEO techniques to quickly get your website in top ranks within days or may be weeks. Search engines like Google may penalize you in various ways if they find out.

If you are in a position where you are confused about the SEO techniques suggested by your SEO consultant, make sure these three are not in the list. These techniques used to work years ago but are now categorized as Black Hat techniques by search engines.

• Keyword Stuffing
  
• Cloaking
  
• Ping Spam

Keyword Stuffing

This used to be a widely practiced technique where contents in the website excessively use keywords to get branded as relevant in search engines and appear easily in top search results page. This can get you penalized now. Keyword density should be between 2% and 4% according to the updated Webmaster’s guidelines provided by Google. 

Cloaking

As the name suggests, this technique allows an SEO practitioner to cloak their websites such that it appears differently to search engines and users. It tricks the search engines to believe that the website is of high quality with great contents while it appears differently to the users. This was used to increase traffic. Google’s new algorithms can identify cloaked websites.

Ping Spam

A black hat technique that uses scripts which periodically notifies search engines of contents which may or may not exist (latter, in most cases). This technique was also able to trick search engines to think that the website has fresh contents. The updated web crawlers can see through the illusion now.

These are just 3 techniques that you should completely avoid. There are others which are not recommended either, including article spinning, hidden texts etc. Before you start practicing an search engine optimization strategy, make sure to refer the webmaster’s guidelines provided by search engines.