How to make the difference between legitimate SEO and Black-Hat techniques that can harm my website?

Before anything else, let’s start with a simple question. Do you know why all search optimization approaches to SEO involving Black-Hat techniques must be avoided at all cost? If not, here is a short answer – illegitimate SEO and Black-Hat optimization techniques can instantly get your website or blog excluded from Google’s search index. Of course, what would be the ultimate worst-case scenario, but anyway such actions (and even partially legitimate so-called Grey-Hat SEO approaches to online promotion) can easily earn you a severe (and sometimes even irreversible) ranking penalty. 

Why? Simply because they all fail to comply with Google’s Major Guidelines for Webmasters. That being said, below I’m going to quickly outline the major criteria and top frequent schemes of SEO based on Black-Hat techniques – for you to avoid at all cost, or at least stay maximum alarmed, should you decide to try anything of the following at your own risk. After all, it’s only up to you to decide, right? So, let’s delve.

Understanding SEO and Black-Hat Techniques

Basically, the very concept of SEO at this level is commonly known as a disapproved practice of a definitely manipulative nature, which is aimed at getting a temporary ranking boost in Google’s SERPs. And the thing is that a list of Black-Hat practices used by those “dark” practitioners most frequently has been already openly exposed with Google’s Major Guidelines for Webmasters. Put simply, pay attention to the following desperate attempts commonly taken for the sake of better rankings themselves and nothing else. Here they are:

• Content Automation – refers to the aggressive use of software platforms and any other automation technologies to generate massive amounts of SEO content to be distributed directly on website or blog pages, via email or social media channels, etc.
• Doorway Pages – are related to specific web pages, which are created for spamdexing purposes. Basically, the process of spamdexing stands for inserting results for a given search phrase to send visitors to a completely different page after all.
• Hidden Text (or Links) – are known for widely used strategies in SEO based on Black-Hat techniques, which are aimed at manipulating Google’s search ranking algorithm. Being fully deceptive, hiding tiny or blurred text – either within your on-page content, or found inside link text anchors – these actions are commonly taken in a desperate attempt to exploit as many excessive keywords as possible. Ultimately – to “trick” with exact-match ranking factors.
• Article Spinning – is another violation that suggests re-writing any third-party content to create a lot of new copies that would be recognized by the major search engines as brand-new and absolutely unique ones. Given that using duplicate content will immediately raise a red flag with Google, article spinning is often used as a part of a much broader Grey-Hat content marketing strategy.

• Miscellaneous Stuff – here is the rest of potentially dangerous places to be avoided. Most commonly, the following are related to low-quality or half-automated link building. Anyway, Google keeps watching us and using any of the these can result in a severe ranking penalty. So, make sure to stay alarmed with negative SEO (otherwise, falsely reporting a competitor website for using anything disapproved by Google), using Sneaky Redirects, joining Like Wheels (otherwise, link exchanges), Link Farms, Private Blog Networks, Markup Spam (based on Rich Snippets), creating Duplicate Content for additional pages/subdomains/domains, as well as Buying Links, and Openly Malicious Behaviour (for example, like phishing, using trojans, and any other malware to manipulate the user’s behaviour and the major search engines themselves).