Once you’ve enjoyed the results of your white-hat SEO experiments, there is a risk of going a little bit further… like using edgeplay techniques.

Where does Google draw the line between what deserves to rank high and what doesn’t? This decision isn’t entirely up to Google; it’s the judge, but users are the jury. Their relationship with a site decides where it belongs.

• If users like a site, keep visiting it and recommend it to others of their own volition, Google understands this site deserves acknowledgment. In this scenario, you can be sure the site was optimized with white hat SEO.
• On the other hand, a site may break through despite failing to satisfy users and even causing complaints. When this happens, there’s a chance the site’s owner has been using shady methods capable of gaming the ranking algorithm. This is called black hat SEO. To avoid these techniques and keep your SEO strategy clean, consider utilizing WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant for optimizing your content effectively.
• Naturally, there’s a middle ground as well: gaming the algorithm via questionable methods that don’t offend users. That’s grey hat SEO. Such methods are still pretty risky because you never know when Google will decide to crack down on them.

Google has been around long enough to collect feedback from billions of users and turn it into a set of guidelines. The process of evaluating sites is almost completely automated. Your site might receive no actual complaints from users and still get penalized for doing something wrong. This shows how important it is to know the difference between white, black and grey hat SEO techniques. To ensure your backlink profile is clean and penalty-free, WebCEO’s Backlink Checker can be an invaluable tool.

Let’s peer through all the shades of grey and black. Read these webmaster anti-guidelines and stay on the path of white hat.

1. Keyword stuffing in the text: writing sentences or even entire paragraphs made mostly of search queries.

2. Keyword stuffing in ALT tags: using those tags to game SEO instead of their actual purpose (writing descriptions which can be used as alternatives to images when they can’t be viewed or displayed).

3. Keyword stuffing in anchor texts: using overly keyword-rich anchor texts in links for the sake of raising the rankings of linked pages.

4. Keyword stuffing in domain names: registering a domain name made of multiple keywords.

5. Spammy anchor text profile: using commercial keywords (e.g. best SEO tools, free SEO tools) in the anchor texts of most or all backlinks.

6. Same anchor text in all backlinks: attempting to make a site rank for a keyword by using it in most or all backlinks.

7. Exact match anchor text: creating internal and external links with anchor texts matching the URL slug of the links.

8. Content swapping: trying to make pages rank for keywords that are unrelated to their actual content.

9. Hidden content: making text or links on a page invisible to the human eye (very small qualifies, too).

10. Using multiple H1 tags on a page: it’s best to use either one H1 header or none at all (using none is not recommended, unless it’s a non-essential page you don’t need to rank).

11. Duplicate content: pages with plagiarized text will be deemed less relevant than the original.

12. Mirror site: an extreme case of duplicate content where a domain is copied in its entirety.

13. Automated content creation: filling your site with content generated with automated software or services.

14. Article spinning: attempting to avoid duplicate content-related issues by rewriting someone else’s content (either manually or automatically).

15. Cloaking: displaying different versions of the same page to humans and search engine bots.

16. False content: writing content that contains factually incorrect information.

17. Malicious content: writing content that tricks or outright goads users into hurting themselves and others.

18. Poorly formatted content: pages containing grammar errors, misspelled words or gibberish, text colored or sized in a disorderly manner, too big or otherwise distracting images.

19. Excessive internal links: placing more internal links to the same pages than needed in order to increase the likelihood of users visiting them.

20. Excessive links in the footer: overloading the footer with links to other sites.

21. Clickbait: giving your pages deceptive, offensive or otherwise provoking titles and headlines.

22. Link exchange: aggressive linking between two or more sites for the sake of building a large link profile.

23. Spam in blog comments: putting spammy links to your domain in another site’s comment section.

24. Guest blog spam: writing guest blog articles with spammy links (or spammy articles to begin with).

25. Spam in social media: making posts and comments with spammy links to your site on social platforms.

26. Buying positive reviews: obtaining positive customer reviews in exchange for a reward (money, products or services).

27. Buying links: obtaining dofollow backlinks from a domain in exchange for a reward (in reality, Google is fine with people paying seemingly legit public relations firms and valid directories for content/listings).

28. Selling links: placing authority-passing links to another domain on your own site in exchange for a reward.

29. Building toxic links: obtaining backlinks from low-quality, unauthoritative domains.

30. Low-authority directory listings: submitting your website to and obtaining backlinks from directories of low quality and authority.

31. Link farming: submitting your site to link farms (websites whose content is mostly links to other domains) or turning your own site into one.

32. Negative SEO: hurting your competitors’ reputation with Google through underhanded means such as submitting false reports against their websites, or building links to them from low-quality and pornographic sites.

33. Content scraping: using software and scripts to steal pieces of content (such as, but not limited to copyrighted content and database information) from other sites.

34. Unethical redirects: rigging elements on a page to open unrelated pages in order to direct traffic there.

35. Doorway pages: baiting users with well-optimized, high-ranking pages which automatically redirect them to unrelated pages.

36. Parasite hosting: planting your page on another domain in order to take advantage of its authority and resources.

37. Domain grabbing: buying expired high-authority domains to build backlinks from them.

38. SEO squatting: a grey hat version of domain grabbing where one buys expired domains only to bypass the process of building their authority from scratch.

39. Google bombing: making a page rank for an unrelated keyword by creating a large number of backlinks with anchor texts containing that keyword (example: in 2013, the query “miserable failure” was made to show web pages on George Bush).

40. Cybersquatting: registering a domain under the name of a known brand without belonging to said brand for the purpose of stealing their traffic or reselling it to them.

41. Typosquatting: registering a domain under a name which is a misspelled version of a known brand’s name without belonging to said brand.

42. Rich snippet markup spam: creating rich snippets with fake information in an attempt to increase a page’s click-through rate.

43. Google Maps spamming: registering fake business listings on Google Maps.

44. Private blog networks: creating a multitude of blogs to accumulate authority and pass it to the main domain.

45. Bait and switch: making an ordinary page rank high and then changing its content to commercial.

46. Sponsored content: paid guest articles containing authority-passing backlinks.

47. Trackback spam: using the TrackBack feature on blogging platforms to send other users notifications with backlinks to your own site.

48. Automated Google queries: using software to generate automated searches for specific keywords in order to make your site rank higher for them.

49. Referrer spam: using fake referrer URLs to send requests to other sites, which leads to said URLs being recorded in the targeted sites’ statistics and crawled by search engines as backlinks.

50. Illegal content: filling pages with types of content prohibited by law.

The post 50 Black and Grey Hat SEO Techniques appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Do you remember how exciting it was to eat only candies, cakes and cookies, when you were a child? And now you are a grown-up and know that it sounds better than it is. The same is true for SEO.  Too much frosting, I mean optimization, may harm your website’s ranking. Here are 5 rules that help you avoid over-optimization and possible penalties caused by it.

These 5 rules may be summarized in one major rule: create your website for visitors, not for search engines. This is not new, but it’s how things really work today. And now some details:

Create content for people.

Use your “natural voice” instead of creating content for the keywords. Google’s primary goal is to provide the best possible search results to its users and good quality content is always going to win out in the long run.  Google Panda provided plenty of evidence that content quality will be a major focus going forward, so be sure to write your content to appeal to your visitors – not just the search engines.

Do not stuff your website’s footer with links.

Large sets of links in a footer look really spammy. No one would ever click on them. Besides, site wide links nowadays have no weight at all. If you really need to get anchor text on pages, find natural ways to put it in the content itself or in the real page menu.

Use natural anchor texts.

It’s important to consider the structure of links.  When you use the same anchor text for each link you create, search engines may suspect you are spamming. Be sure to modify your anchor text to create a natural looking link profile: on each iteration make it longer, shorter, change some words. This is a much more effective way to do SEO than always using the same anchors.

Avoid links from bad sources.

It’s really hard to control if you’ve already gotten links from bad places. But you can avoid link farms, reciprocal link schemes and article marketing sites when you are building new links. Besides, getting too many backlinks too quickly will always look suspicious to the search engines.

Make every page useful.

Each page on your site needs to serve a purpose for your visitors. The days of creating lots of similar pages that are solely for the search engines to rank but have no tangible value for visitors except to trick them to come to your site (and possibly click an ad) is coming to an end. Visitors don’t like to see multiple pages on a website for nearly identical things–they get confused and think you’re playing games with them, and so does Google.

By integrating WebCEO’s SEO Content Assistant into your strategy, you can more easily adhere to these guidelines, ensuring your content is both user-friendly and optimized for search engines, without falling into the trap of over-optimization.

The post 5 Rules That Help You Avoid Over-Optimization appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It is New Year’s Eve and you want to follow the annual tradition of making those resolutions that, let’s face it, you won’t be fully keeping. We make resolutions with the best intentions but January ends and we forget most of them.

However, if you are an online business or rely on your site to bring in valuable business then there are some resolutions you seriously should think about making and keeping during 2013.

Do not start 2013 with false resolutions; start with the year by making your business prosperous.

1. Start with a full SEO audit.

This will help you understand what’s happening on your site so that you know what needs to change and where you’ll need to invest in your site to make it happen. A qualitative SEO audit involves looking at elements like your internal and external linking, code validation, URLs, redirects, digital assets, mobile presence, conversions, etc, to find areas of strength and weakness. The actual analysis is broken down into five large sections: accessibility, indexability, on-page ranking factors, off-page ranking factors and competitive analysis. With your audit in hand, it can be a lot easier to develop an actionable plan for the whole year.

2. Adopt more effective tools.

It’s high time to review your marketing toolset. Take another look at the tools you’re using, the applications you’re depending on and the work environment you’ve set up for yourself. Is it working or are you still struggling to spend your office hours as productively as you can? The less you have to worry about how you work, the more you can focus on what you’re working on. Here WebCEO Online is your greatest helper, especially in SEO reporting. All of the site performance monitoring and quality checking tools can run reports on schedule and save you the time that you can use for being more social, for example.

3. Create your social media plan.

If you still haven’t developed a social media strategy for your business, you should do it now. Remember that all your marketing (I mean social media marketing first of all) should be integrated. Your aim is to develop a marketing plan in which nothing is off the table – video, mobile, display advertising and even more traditional offline advertising.

4. Learn more about Local/Schema/Social/Mobile/etc.

Every day there appears to be more and more things in web marketing and social optimization that can be learnt. We all live with a permanent lack of time and you want to read only the most important things (such as our blog ).  The best way to learn more is to practice. You can make a case for leveling up in mobile, social, video, schema, local, and a lot more.

5. Avoid over-optimization.

Google again and again hits webmasers with over-optimization penalties. Remember the Google algorithm updates from 2012 – Panda, Penguin, Ads above the fold. The updates aim to remove spam websites from the Google results pages (spam according to Google, of course). Your task for the year 2013 is to balance on that thin line between proper optimization and overdoing it.

Keep these promises and grow your online business to new heights. We, in our turn, promise to keep you informed with great SEO and SEM related news, answer your questions and explain website promotion basics, give you social media advice and maintain WebCEO Online as the best SEO toolkit for DIY and teamwork (try our online collaboration feature with logins from your own domain).

We will explain how to implement your New Year’s resolutions’ promises in our next posts.

The post SEO Resolution for 2013 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.