SEO methods. Gray optimization techniques

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a set of methods for promoting sites in search results. If you look at it in more detail, then this is a set of actions that somehow affect search robots. Competent optimization helps to break out of the TOP-10, which significantly increases website traffic. The wrong approach, in turn, can greatly harm the popularity of the site.

Smart and approved optimization that does not use prohibited methods is called white SEO. Semi-literate and not always approved by search engines is a gray promotion. Black SEO refers to the methods of bringing sites to the TOP of search results prohibited by search engines.

SEO techniques

White optimization - website promotion without using unwanted and prohibited methods. The most effective ways:

• Improved usability.
• Registration in popular catalogs.
• Improving the functionality of the site.
• Improvement and optimization of design.
• Work on behavioral factors.
• and other methods.

Gray SEO - Officially gray marketing methods are not prohibited, but they are discouraged by search engines. Gray methods include:

• Oversupply keywords on site pages.
• Excessive number of paid links to your resource.
• and other methods.

Resources that are promoted by these methods may be subject to sanctions at any time. search engines.

Black SEO promotion - all methods that violate the rules of search engines. It can be:

• Link spam.
• Cloaking.
• Doorways.
• Invisible text.
• Hidden links.
• and other methods.

For black promotion, resource hacks are sometimes used, including for placing hidden links to promoted resources. Wiki sites are especially vulnerable because of the high trust of search engines in them, they become easy and desirable prey for spammers.

Black website promotion

In this section, we'll show you how not to do it. All these tricks will almost 100% throw you out of the TOP (if you get there). Unscrupulous webmasters use the following techniques:

• Invisible text. This is a text that has the same color as the background. The text is not visible to the visitor, but it is. And it is visible to search robots. Today robots have learned to recognize such manipulations and to punish the guilty.
• Hidden links. There is a method of publishing the necessary links without being noticed by the user. They are simply sewn into a letter, a punctuation mark or an emoticon. There is no animation on hover and the user cannot understand that there is a link in front of him. But, the search engine bites through this method once or twice. And justly punishes those who tried to improperly manipulate the reference mass.
• Keywords. Among unscrupulous SEOs, the service of promotion through “keywords” still lives on. Moreover, texts are saturated without taking into account the context and such a text does not carry a semantic load. If earlier search engines really promoted those sites with a higher percentage of keywords to the top, today the usefulness of the text plays a much greater role.

  Remember that you are not writing for a robot, but for people - it is important to write a useful text with relevant information. Then users will stay on the site longer, and the search engine will promote you as a reward for your usefulness.

  This does not mean that keywords no longer work. This means that you should not abuse their use in your texts.

• Cloaking (cloak- mask, cover). One of the black SEO methods. It is based on the fact that the user and the search robot are shown different page options. Why use it? The fact is that pages are difficult to optimize for different search queries... Therefore, two different page variants are created. The first is with overspam of keywords for the search engine. The second is with human content. Making copies of pages is a painstaking work, since not only the basics of programming are required, but also the presence of data such as ip or user-agent of robots.
• The next method is based on the abuse of search algorithms. One of the important parameters is the presence of keys in the headings of the text (title and h1). Unscrupulous webmasters flooded headlines with keywords by type (Targeted advertising. Order targeted advertising. Targeted advertising inexpensive). Previously, the search engine saw an abundance of keys and brought the site to the TOP. Now such sites receive only "by the header" - search engines have learned to recognize such manipulations.
• Uncontrolled link building. Another example of abuse of legal SEO promotion techniques. At the dawn of search engine optimization, specialists were mainly engaged in the purchase of links to a resource. The arithmetic is simple - the more links to a site, the more popular it is in the eyes of a search engine.

  This continued until the release of the Minusinsk algorithms (from Yandex) and Penguin (from Google). Now links are by no means the main ranking factor and not only the number of these links is taken into account, but also their quality (the quality of sites varies depending on age and topic). The older the site and the more decent it is, the more valuable the link is. Previously, experts did not hesitate to buy links in thousands on adult resources - after all, it's a lot and it's cheap. And links were valued equally with those obtained from top thematic resources. Today the situation is different - the quality of the resource that refers to you comes first, then the correspondence of the site themes - the donor and the recipient site.

• Doorway method. The doorway method consists in getting traffic to a specially created resource (often with absolutely unreadable content, but filled with keywords) and redirecting traffic to the required site.

  In this form (not readable for people, but perfectly optimized for a search engine), the doorway is not shown to users. They do this: a doorway site gets into search results. By clicking on the link, the user is immediately redirected to the landing page or the site to which traffic is attracted. He doesn't even know that he got here through the doorway site. Now such types are almost never used, because search engines automatically sanction the site for mobile redirects somewhere.

• Satellite method. Satellite or satellite site, which is understood as a full-fledged resource. When they talk about satellites, they draw a beautiful analogy with a summer cottage and an apple orchard. You have a summer cottage and an apple orchard. You get a harvest of apples from them. At some point, you notice that the neighbors do not take care of their apple trees at all and you invite them to take care of the trees so that they do not die, and you will take the harvest for yourself. This is how satellites work - they collect traffic for you.

  Many people do this today. Large companies to take more place in the search results. Online reputation management specialists use this method to displace negativity from the visibility zone in search results.

  The method is completely legal, but effective as long as the rules of the game are followed. Such work requires a solid budget, because each resource is created separately and it takes months of work to build a network of satellites. You need absolutely unique content and design of your resources. You must strictly monitor the correspondence of the topics of your sites.

• Swapping. In a different way, content replacement. A common technique and not only in search engine promotion, when it swings enough useful resource, it has a lot of loyal and high-quality audience, and then the topic changes dramatically. Often the change goes towards projects like: casinos, sports betting, materials for adults, forex and others.

  Swapping works even now - after all, a certain amount of time passes before the search engine will understand that the subject has changed. But when this is revealed, the site flies out of the SERP and gets banned.

• Cheating behavioral factors. Today behavioral factors came to the fore in the list of the most influencing the position of the site in the search results. Without thinking twice, there were craftsmen who promise you to "tweak" these factors.

  They let robots or motivated traffic to your website (people who want to make money on clicks, subscriptions or other targeted actions). All this fraternity walks through your resource and creates activity - clicks something, goes through the pages, leaves applications. In a word - a mess. Search engines see such suspicious and unnatural activity and throw your resource out of the search results. You will lose a lot in organic traffic (about 90%) and lose in positions. It will be possible to get out of the sanctions only after a long period of time. It is impossible to say for sure how big it is - the process of "punishment" is automated and technical support will not be able to help you in any way.

• Cheat search suggestions. Another type of cheat. Have you noticed that when you enter a word or query into the search bar, the search engine prompts you for the end of the phrase or the next word. This is because this request popular and since you entered part of the query, then you are probably looking for it. Not all hints are shown there because this query is popular.

  They often use cheating companies as a competitive tool or political forces for the same purpose. Sometimes cheating search suggestions serve the purposes of "black PR".

• Relic bug. There was a bug in Yandex for some time. Your site could take off in the TOP in a few days or hours. To do this, it was necessary to send traffic to the site from many different devices at some request. However, when the traffic ran out, the site returned to its previous position.

In this long, but hopefully not tiring chapter, we've brought you black SEO. They told everything without concealment. We understand that you will not do this and you will control your SEO, but we want to give you some tips on “white seo” in addition.

If you want your site to grow up and to be at the top of the search results, then here's our TOP tips from SEO specialists:

• We will not tire of repeating this. Write texts for people! Today, useful and interesting content rules. Delight your user with an interesting article about “1000 and 1 ways to use your product in an unconventional way”. Don't let your texts turn into a jumble of keywords like “buy a bicycle Moscow”, but tell people how to choose one. They themselves will come to you later.
• Generate unique content. Continuing the previous point. Even if you see good text from competitors, you can't just slap it. The search engine will notice this and it will hurt. Better generate your own - unique. Such content will inevitably be shared, which means an increase in the authority of your resource for you.
• Correct linking... According to research, the presence of linking increases the time spent on the site by 30% or more. Can you imagine what a plus to the karma of your resource ?!
• Adding a site to directories. Today this method brings little result. Basically, due to the fact that they act as they did 15 years ago - they are added to 1000 garbage directories, instead of one or two top ones.
• Use your keywords wisely. There are no comments here - just use them appropriately and don't spam.
• Keep track of the quality of the resources with which you exchange links. Only reliable, “decent” donors from your topic. These are much more likely to find your target audience.
• Using pop-up banners. These are banners that pop up when you enter the site, when you try to leave it, or just when you view content. And righteous anger arises not only among users, but also among search engines. The pop-up works well to retain customers from the context - the conversion at least somehow raises, but for search engine optimization it is bad manners.
• Spam on forums. Website promotion using mass mailing or spam in forums can also negatively affect the effectiveness of promotion. So stop scattering your links all over the comments and forum threads. All the same, there are only spammers who have not read this article. And you've read it - don't do that.
• Using the h1, h2 and title tags. Create engaging headlines that capture the essence and convey usefulness. Include important keywords and go ahead - to conquer the tops of the TOP.
• Work on the usability of the site. Analyze how users behave on your site. Where they click, where they hold their attention, and what they quickly scroll through. This will give you additional data to improve your site. In the end, no one has canceled the still dominance of behavioral factors.

Outcome

Black methods and means of promotion have always existed and will continue to exist. After all, the system is not perfect and is constantly changing. If you work with "white" topics and your product or service is allowed to advertise, then you do not need to resort to such risky methods of SEO promotion. If you don't know where to start, then the best solutions will develop various promotion strategies in conjunction with specialists. Search engine promotion is a long and labor-intensive process. But, and the result in the form of the hottest customers is worth it.

Any Internet resource, regardless of its specifics and timing of creation, requires a timely and effective advancing... If this process has already been launched once, in no case should it be suspended - this can nullify all efforts aimed at promoting in the past. Daily at global network many websites are emerging, providing a fairly tough competition environment. That is why a site devoid of attention from its owner will easily get lost among tens of thousands of its analogues.

Today in the global network there are many offers from marketing agencies and individual webmasters engaged in search engine optimization of sites. However, before using the services of a specific specialist, it will be useful to ask him what methods he is going to use in the process of promoting your web resource. Today, there are several basic definitions of how to bring an Internet site to the first positions of search engines.

Firstly, it is a "white" technique, which involves the use of activities officially approved by search engines. Website promotion that uses prohibited techniques is called "black" and, despite its effectiveness at first, can lead to negative consequences in the future. A web resource promoted using this approach is likely to be blocked by search engines soon, which, in turn, will lead to a complete collapse of the company's Internet presence on the network.

"Gray" methods website promotion: on the border of permitted and prohibited

Treasured by their reputation, experienced optimizers try not to use "black" promotion methods, the use of which does not contribute to long-term and long-term cooperation with search engines. However, most often, the optimal solution is on the verge between prohibited and legal promotion methods.

Most often, this approach is called "gray", since the promotion process does not use obviously violating generally accepted rules and techniques. At the same time, when using "Gray" methods of promotion there is no guarantee that after some time the resource will not be blocked due to changes in search algorithms.

"Gray" website promotion: main positions

The "gray" methods of website promotion include:

1. Frequent use of tags like and that affect the ranking algorithm of search robots. This technique allows you to slightly raise the site's rating, however, it is not long-term.
2. Exchange of non-thematic links. This method promotion allows you to draw the attention of users to the resource by "throwing" them links, the subject of which does not concern the content of the resource. Most likely, a website promoted using this technique will only be in one-time demand, since a user who, having followed the link, will not find what he was looking for there, will never look at such a page again.
3. Buying links from other websites. This technique, which can be determined by the presence of out-of-place links in the text, is widely used by services such as XAP and SAPE.
4. Services of services of automatic exchange of content. This includes resources such as outlink.ru, addpage.ru, etc. It should be noted that at the moment search engines do not recognize sites participating in such services.
5. Paid linkers for buying external links. The most popular search engines are able to recognize low-quality links, the number of which is growing exponentially, so this technique practically does not allow you to achieve any significant result.
6. Exchange of non-thematic articles. The effect of this technique will be approximately the same as that of working with non-thematic links. The difference is that in this case the site owner will additionally need materials for publication, for which you also need to pay.
7. Using links from non-existent web pages. Such links are taken from resources in which, for one reason or another, there are flaws in the development of scripts that are responsible for search forms. This method website promotion works when, along with the query of interest, the user enters certain characters into the search string.
8. Purchase of sites for your content on other sites or posting materials taken from other resources on the pages of your own website. Internet sites selling space for articles run the risk of being sanctioned by search engines, in particular, for the low level of ranking in the text of posted articles. At the same time, external links to sites that buy sites for their material will not be taken into account by search robots in the indexing process.

Using "gray" methods in the process of website promotion