What are the signs that your agency is practicing black-hat SEO techniques?

Black-hat SEO services are when a company or webmaster implements strategies outside Google Webmaster Guidelines. Black-hat optimization is common in our days despite on all the efforts search engines make to fight and prevent it. Optimization companies use this kind of SEO as it is much easier to get rankings this way then implement organic SEO. The problem is that black-hat SEO gives not long-lasting result and may cause search engine sanctions that include rankings drop and even deindexation. Having significant experience in an SEO world, I can say that it is well worth the effort to build quality over time. SEO cannot be done overnight. It is a long-lasting process that will bring you a result in 4 or 6 months. Many businesses especially those who are new to a digital market want to see quick optimization results. That's why they usually get hooked on black-hat SEO services. 

This article is designed for those business owners who have a lack of experience with optimization agencies. Here I am going to share with you some tips how to spot if your SEO company is black hat. These tips will help you to help you to distinguish between white and black-hat SEO and stay away from fraudulent optimization agencies.

Let us start with the explanation of the difference between white- and black-hat optimization techniques. 

What is the difference between white-hat and black-hat SEO services?

The primary difference between these two types of optimization services lays in the approaches used when trying to improve a website's search rank. Black-hat optimization techniques are designed to game ranking systems. They break all search engine rules and requirements. Black-hat SEO is search engine oriented. It brings any value for ordinary users. It is typically used by those webmasters who are looking for a quick return on a site. This kind of SEO cannot be regarded as a long-term investment. 

The services that are used by black-hat SEO webmasters include link purchasing, link farming, keyword stuffing, content copy-pasting, blog content spamming, and so on. The usage of these services can end up in wasting all your optimization efforts.

In their term, white-hat SEO services are those that are oriented on users, not search engines. These strategies meet all search engine requirements and rules and can be regarded as a long-term investment in business development. White-hat optimization techniques usually take time and efforts. They include website audit, market niche analysis, keyword analysis, keyword research, meta tags optimization, content writing, link building, and so on. All these techniques are made with the user in mind. Those businesses who use white-hat SEO expect to make a long-term investment on their website, as the results last a long time. 

How to spot if your SEO company is black-hat?

Unrealistic guarantees

SEO is not a sphere where you can get fast results. If somebody promises you TOP rank position or high traffic flow for a limited time, it is a sign that there is something wrong. Even great SEO brains cannot guarantee that the SEO strategy they build will perform well. In a digital market everything can change in a moment, so everything that remains is to wait and see. Be ready that organic SEO is a process that works gradually over the long term, so you should not expect a quick return from it. The only way to get quick results in SEO is through using black-hat optimization techniques. However, we all know that such SEO does not have a long-lasting effect. 

They are not cooperating with other clients

Before hiring any optimization agencies, you should check their client's list and portfolio. If they do not have any, then you should be suspicious. Maybe you will be the first client in their company, or what is worse it is a flight-by-night firm that just wants to get money from you. That is why it is important to get an idea of work that your agency is doing for other businesses. It is a good idea to contact with the clients of your optimization company to check whether they get optimization results over the long term or not. 

The quality of backlinks you get is extremely low

The quality link profile is what you need to build a winning online marketing campaign. Backlinks serve to improve your brand visibility on the web and attract targeted search traffic to your pages. However, not all backlinks are of this kind. As it takes a significant amount of time and efforts to build relevant and authoritative links, many optimization firms implement some tricky techniques to game the system and show you good results. That is why you should always track the links your agency is building to your site. You can do it in a variety of ways. For example, you can ask your SEO services provider for a monthly list of the links they are building to your site. You can examine the quality of these links by yourself or with the help of specific research tools such as Semalt Auto SEO, Majestic SEO or Google Analytics. If you have noticed that some of your links are of low quality, use Google Disavow Tool to get rid of them. 

Draw your attention to the following factors to decide what kind of backlinks your optimization agency get for your site:

• There is a considerable rise in links to your site;
• There is a variety of terms being used as anchor text for your links;
• Your brand name is a common anchor text term for your links;
• Your site is often linked by third-party foreign web sources or even adult sites;
• Your link profile grows very fast.

All these factors show that you are in a risk zone and you will get Google penalties very soon. Using the mentioned above tools, you can observe any strange traffic spikes and investigate the sources where these links are coming from. Investing your link profile, use your own best judgment. If some of the links in your profile look like earned or unnatural, ask your SEO provider about them. You should quickly disavow these links. Otherwise, you could get Penguin penalty and lose your ranking for that term. 

On-site optimization issues

As a rule, black-hat SEO is associated with automated link building. However, it can also affect on-site SEO. For instance, such things like keyword stuffing, spun content, cloaking, and doorway pages are common things that fall into a black-hat category. They can negatively affect your website SEO and cost you your business reputation. 

It is not difficult to spot on-site optimization issues, even if you have a lack of experience in SEO. For instance, keyword stuffing is when the same search terms repeatedly occur in your site content, especially in those places where they shouldn’t be. 

The use of cloaking you can check by doing a fetch as Googlebot or checking the cached version of your page and see if it matches what you see.

Any usages of spun and copy-pasted content will be seen through the plagiarism search engines. 

The rapid rises and falls of your site rankings

When an optimization agency or individual consultant implement black-hat optimization techniques, their clients see a good boost in rankings and traffic flow during the first three to six months, and then they start rapidly losing their positions. Sometimes it can be not a drastic fall, but a more rapid gradual one. 

All in all, you will notice these changes when an optimization campaign will be completed. That is why to avoid any money, and SEO effort loses, you should know how to spot black-hat SEO activity. If the poor quality content is being added to your site and a lot of questionable quality links are being built, it is time to sound the alarm. You should immediately stop your cooperation with this SEO provider and look for a more reliable company that can improve your situation using only white-hat optimization techniques. But the thing is, if you used a black-hat SEO company in the past and are now with a good one, they will need some time to reverse the bad work. Your new SEO provider should be working under black-hat SEO affect elimination including link disavowing, link clean up, on-site SEO improvement, earning new links and inbound marketing implementation. 

Conclusion

If you are not lucky to work with fraudulent SEO provider who uses black-hat optimization techniques, you should stop any businesses with them and start building your way back up the rankings. However, it will take time to convince the search engine that you are acting properly. That is why the sooner you act, the better.