Black Hat SEO Strategies

Black Hat SEO Strategies- Why it’s a no-go zone for jewelry stores today

‘As human beings, we’re wired to overreach’- so quipped the famous Eddie Mourra in the 2011 hit movie, Limitless. It’s crystal clear that Eddie (Bradly Cooper) was onto something when he said these words. In fact, analyzing this statement deeper, Eddie was discussing about the desire that most ambitious people have. As a hardworking young entrepreneur, it can be tough to edge your way to the top, especially if you’re facing fierce competition from already established brands in your given business niche. Naturally, wouldn’t you love to find a loophole that can suddenly boost leads and conversions to your business exponentially? And just like every other newly established online jewelry store, jewelers find it hard to curve their name out in a fierce marketing environment.

Sadly, some of these new jewelers adopt other dubious means to try and get themselves to the top. Folks, we’re talking about SEO for jewelry stores using black hat SEO strategies; quite an ugly affair if you ask us! In fact, ever since the Penguin updates of 2012, most online jewelry stores that had initially adopted Black Hat SEO techniques are now bearing the brunt of their mistakes; and suffering immensely at it mind you! Everything from a massive dip in their rankings to significant loss in revenue is what they are experiencing as we speak!

So if you’re planning to tap into the online jewelry business, or you’ve just started to gain traction, here are some black hat SEO techniques that you should NEVER use.

Creating Hidden Text and Content

As tempting as it might sound, if you do this, then you’ve got to prepare for a funeral a few weeks later. And whose is it for? Your jewelry store of course! An age-old Black Hat SEO technique, hidden content was basically a cheeky way of filling your pages with keywords that weren’t visible to your readers, but could be easily recognized by search engine bots.

So how does this take place? Well, one old-fashioned way was to have a similar font color for keywords with that of the background. This way, your readers couldn’t be able to see a thing but the bots could see all crystal clear.

Another absurd technique was the use of comment tags. Basically, one had to simply create comments such as this <!-Jewelry store in New Jersey->, kind of like the ones that web site developers use to place specific comments in their code when they needed to remind themselves of something. This way, these comments could be stuffed with a myriad of keywords, and they would go unpunished because the bots would simply see them at a programming level as comments!

Today, however, it’s a different affair. With the updates, search engine spiders can immediately identify these hidden content techniques, and penalize you mercilessly to the point that you would rather play it safe and work your way to the top the right way.

Using Link Farms

Link farming is still practiced widely on a myriad of websites today. And to be honest, it’s a total gamble. Putting it simply, link farming is increasing the number of sites that you are linked with in order to increase search engine optimization, as well as traffic. Don’t get us wrong, we think that linking is great, especially if you’re linking with quality sites that build your popularity, ranking, and relevance. However, when the latter is done, that is linking with sites that have nothing to do with your business niche, you can be penalized severely by Google. Once the search engines spiders realize that you’re linking to irrelevant sites to your market niche (which might be causing higher bounce rates despite more traffic), then you will see yourself significantly drop in the rankings.

The Use of Gateway Pages

Also known as doorways, this backhand SEO technique recently underwent a massive crackdown thanks to Google updating their search engine spiders to block all the loopholes. In fact, if you’re an avid Internet user, then at one point or another, you’ve been a victim of gateway pages. This is how it works; say you were initially on a site for clothing, then see a site popup that you want to enter. Once you click the site’s listing, you’ll be sent to the site’s landing page. But before you even get there, a doorway redirects you to another page, while attempting to send the search bot to a page filled with keywords. It was one of the most successful Black Hat SEO techniques; but in recent times, it’s become a major reason for severe drop in rankings and penalization.

So no matter how you look at it, there is no way that Black Hat SEO will give you that coveted top ranking on any search engine. And if you’re a jewelry store, we urge you to play it safe and go the White Hat SEO way. Trust us when we say that the results of great SEO techniques are much more rewarding!

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