You may or may not have known about black hat SEO strategies but what you do know is that they are bad for any business. It is only prudent to avoid them. However, the lesser-known fact is that you may well be using so of the most used black hat strategies without even knowing.
In this article, we list the top five most frequently used black hat SEO strategies that are doing more damage than good, especially for the lawyers, attorneys and law firms.
5 Most Utilized Black Hat SEO Strategies
- Paid Links
Buying a bunch of links that promise quality reach can be tempting. However, it never ends well. The negative effect of paid links is both direct and indirect to a law firm. Not only do you risk penalizing your site but also you get a lot of irrelevant traffic to your site, which ends up resulting in a higher bounce rate.
Google and other search engines translate this low dwell and high bounce rate to mean the low likeability of your site and lower your ranking. Another negative impact is that the quality of your content takes a down turn as you become more careless in your strategies.
- Keyword Stuffing
This a deadly mistake only rookies make in their law firm SEO strategies. However, it is still a common black hat strategy. It is most popular because it bumps up a sites SEO ranking. However, there are SEO tools and the changing SEO algorithm that tracks the relevancy of keywords and only lets the quality keyword sites survive the tough fight for the top.
- Duplicate Content
Duplicate content strategy happens when you copy blocks of content from other sites or when a tool identifies any other form of plagiarism on your site. Both keyword stuffing and duplicate content are black hat strategies when you are careless with your content creation. The best way to avoid this is to create your own content. Not only will it make your content original but it will also help showcase your skills and knowledge in the legal industry.
- Click Bait Material
Considering the nature of the legal industry, we are sure you realize the importance of this point. Law firm cannot afford to exaggerate or quote anything which is not exactly of that value. If displaying number to attract clients to attract them to your service seems to you then make sure that those numbers actually exist. To sum it up, Click bait does not work.
- Comment Spamming
This is the worst of all. Comment spamming makes you lose all of your authority. Not only does it project a bad shadow on the lawyer name it also shows lack of respect of other people’s privacy and your selfishness. Comment spamming does not result in anything productive and only ends in a site ban or penalization.
Bottom Line
Black hat seo strategies are in use widely, and they do more damage to your site and your reputation than it does ever does good. While some are implementing these very much intentionally, your competitors can use it on your site as a form of attack. The best way to avoid this is to constantly monitor your site and fix any identified black hats.