With the plethora of black-hat tricks being employed by webmasters on the Internet in the attempt to inflate the exposure of their sites in search engine results, there really is no surprise that increasingly larger of people complain about getting banned by Google these days. For many, the temptation of getting quick SEO results without all the hard work is just too intense to resist and proves costly in the long run, as they eventually witness their websites spiraling down in search engines’ hierarchies.

The worrying thing is that too many people out there are still clue-less about what black-hat stands for and what they risk when they go about these practices. One thing is for certain, knowingly or not, cheating is a big no-no in search engine optimization, and it definitely transpires at some point. When it does, you have to pay the consequences, and trust me, if you care about your website, you wouldn’t want to be messing around with the gods of the Internet!

Nowadays there is a broad spectrum of backdoor tricks that can get you penalized by Google and other major search engines. In the rest of this article, we will concentrate on the “on page” factors with the greatest potential of costing you a ban, and learn how to avoid them.

The big four black-hat practices you should really keep away from are hidden text, alt image tag spamming, meta tag stuffing and title tag stuffing. Not only do they spell ban in the long term, they really aren’t worth the trouble anyway, so don’t go risking it all over nothing!

Hidden Text

Hidden text is a common practice of slipping in keywords within the pages of a particular website without visitors noticing them. While people who access the website are unaware of its existence, search engines know hidden text is there and rank the website containing it accordingly.

Considering it is ridiculously easy to implement, this black-hat technique is now highly common among webmasters looking to give their websites a quick fix. All it takes is to make up a list with useful keywords and blend it in with the background of your website. However, search engine’s spiders are nowadays increasingly more aware about hidden text and when they detect it, they immediately take action.

Exploiting Alt Images

This one here also stands out as a popular technique of inconspicuously stuffing keywords into the content of a website. Normally, alt images are used to support or act as backup for regular graphics that fail to load properly; in such cases, they would display their contained text when a visitor hovers the mouse over that particular graphic.

As part of black-hat SEO practices, alt images is turned into spamming, as they are stuffed with as many keywords as possible without drawing any attention from website users. Stay away from this if or you will risk serious penalties for your website.

Meta Tag Stuffing

Meta tag stuffing is the ridiculous attempt of using the same keyword repeatedly as part of websites’ meta tags. The risks of using this tactic are very high, and to be honest about it, considering major search engines don’t even use meta tags anymore in setting websites’ rankings, meta tag stuffing really isn’t worth the trouble.

Title Tag Stuffing

The same thing described above also applies for title tag stuffing, but many people these days are relentless at trying to fool search engines by slipping more keywords in their websites’ title tags. However, apart from being a complete waste of time and a nice way of attracting search engines’ wrath upon your website, title tag stuffing will get you nowhere, so stay away from it.