Are SEO Proxies Black Hat? Let’s Explore!

Proxies, SEO, Jun-04-20225 mins read

SEO proxies anonymize your SEO research and help you to conduct intensive SEO campaigns. These campaigns involve a series of web scraping activities such as keyword research, competition research, and rank tracking. These campaigns require sending requests to a target website to extract necessary details which might to the target website blacklist your IP address.  

SEO proxies anonymize your SEO research and help you to conduct intensive SEO campaigns. These campaigns involve a series of web scraping activities such as keyword research, competition research, and rank tracking. These campaigns require sending requests to a target website to extract necessary details which might to the target website blacklist your IP address.  

Proxies help avoid IP blacklists by allowing you to create numerous accounts to access social media for marketing. SEO proxies track search engine rankings and harvest links and data.

The SEO proxies are white hat if you use these for SEO research and stay within the search engine’s terms and conditions to improve search engine rankings. Black hat SEO proxies use SEO strategies such as spammy links and content and hidden links to point toward a target to increase the search engine rankings.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It helps a website or an article to improve the website’s visibility when people search for it in a search engine. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely it is to gain attention and attract prospects.

SEO strategies make the content rank high on Google. SEO involves organic ranking which means that you don’t need to pay to appear in that space. SEO optimizes your content so search engines like Google will rank you at the top of the search when someone is searching for it. 

On-page and Off-page SEO

SEO strategies need both on-page SEO and off-page SEO. The most common search engine optimization tactics are

  • Keywords in the article title.
  • Optimizing the meta description to be picked up in search engine results pages(SERP).
  • Using HTML code and Alt tags.

On-page SEO optimization is the measure the proxy takes within the website on the content. These measures help the article to improve its position rank in the search engine. The on-page optimization techniques make it easy for search engine bots to interpret the page and also give the optimal result for the user’s search. On-page SEO techniques consider the overall content quality, page performance, and content structure.

On-page SEO factors

  • Content
  • Keywords
  • Title Tags
  • Meta Description
  • Alt Text
  • SSL/HTTPS
  • URL structure
  • Internal Linking
  • Breadcrumb Navigation
  • Page Performance

Content – Users must find The content informative for them to visit your site. You can optimize keywords, descriptions, internal linking, and images.

Keywords – You must build the website’s content around the keywords, or what your target audience might search for. A long-tail keyword is best and suits the target audience’s search pattern.

Title Tag – The title tag is a crucial part of on-page next to the content. It is important to choose your words wisely and ensure that the title is 65 characters or less.

Meta Description – The meta description is a short description of the content on the page to help the web page stand out in the list of SERP results. It appears below the URL on the search engine results page and below a headline in a social media post. The meta description is best below 155 characters to ensure that the entire description is shown in search results.

Alt Text – Alt Text is a word or a phrase describing the image. It helps the search engine index the image.

Page Security – Enabling SSL improves page security, trustworthiness, and visibility. You ensure that a third party does not come between your web server and the user’s web server. Google also prefers sites that are SSL-enabled to boost visibility.

URL structure – A structured URL enables the search engine to crawl from page to page on your website, making navigation easier. The URL must contain the keywords that reflect the pages they direct to. An easy-to-understand URL will get more clicks and help search engines crawl your sites.

Internal Linking – An important on-page SEO factor is linking to related pages on your website because it helps search engines to crawl for everything on the site.

Breadcrumb Navigation – This is a roadmap for website visitors to understand their location on the site and helps Google understand the structure of your website.

Page Performance – Pages that take a long time to load or pages that are not mobile-friendly rank low in SERPs because it increases the bounce rate as users get distracted and leave the website. An important on-page SEO factor for the web page to load quickly is that the image size must be less, reduce redirects, and have a minimal amount of CSS/Javascript.

Off-page SEO factors

Off-page SEO factors are backlinks from another site that affect the page ranking of your website. It includes your promotional methods and exposure on social media.

Backlink – The number and quality of backlinks that you have on your webpage are the biggest factors of off-page SEO. Google boosts your ranking for your sites if there are more sites linking to your content. There are paid link-building tactics to make your content rank higher, including

  • Guest blogging
  • Podcasts
  • Hosting events
  • Press Releases

Domain Authority – The domain authority is a number search engines award on a scale from 1 to 100 to determine the strength of your website. Google picks those pages from websites having higher domain authority.

Social Promotion – Promoting your website on social media generates clicks that will help boost traffic to the site.

On-page SEO uses content to improve your rankings and involves

  • Incorporating keywords into your content.
  • Writing high-quality content regularly.
  • Meta Tags and titles are keyword-rich.

Off-page SEO is the optimization happening off your website such as 

  • Earning backlinks. 
  • Encouraging branded searches
  • Increasing engagement and shares on social media.

What are SEO proxies?

SEO proxies enable you to access the internet without revealing your IP address or location. Google collects information about your location and sends the results based on your location, but you want to remain anonymous when you are doing SEO research. You don’t want any personalized results but want SERP results like your competitors.

SEO proxies remove personalization so you can monitor your website rankings without the influence of your personalized information about your browsing history. This information is critical as you want to analyze why some websites rank and others don’t.

Features

When you use proxies for SEO, there are a  few elements that you need to pay attention to.

The number of Residential proxies

You will scrape a huge number of websites for SEO research. Sometimes, you will scrape customer reviews, product reviews, price details, and other details from the website. You must ensure that the proxy provider has enough proxies to do the work without the target website blocking you.

To achieve this, you must use residential proxies to be sure not to be blocked by any other website. Residential proxies take IPs from a pool of proxies and keep changing the IPs making it hard for the target website to recognize the changing IPs and block them.

Location Targeting

SEO research would require you to get keywords that rank according to their geolocation. The proxy provider must provide proxies with IP addresses to use in different regions. 

Advantages of SEO proxies

  • Using proxies, you can create more accounts and manage multiple accounts and profiles on social media.
  • Proxies allow you to get a seamless analysis of SERP data, and to operate and access restricted content in other locations.
  • Knowing your competitor’s SEO strategy and your position against that strategy will help you to stay ahead of the competition. 
  • Rank tracking requires periodic scraping from search engines. There’s a risk of your IP getting blocked if done from a single IP. Proxies help you to scrape data from different IPs.
  • Proxies help scrape all relevant meta descriptions. 

Need for an SEO Proxy

Search engines provide exposure, visibility, reputation, and traffic to websites. It provides a platform for a tremendous opportunity to acquire customers but search engines also come with certain challenges. 

It is important that your website or article is visible to Google. SEO is important to feed the search engine, and its campaigns comprise keyword research, competitor research, and rank tracking for web scraping. Since these are a large number of fast proxies scraping the web, there is a risk of target websites blacklisting your IPs.

Using proxies provides anonymity because the websites cannot see their public IP address and scrapers can scrape the websites like regular visitors. 

Extraction and Automation

SEO is necessary for online marketing. It improves the website’s visibility and increases organic traffic. Businesses are putting more effort into SEO monitoring and campaigns as the results are promising. A successful SEO campaign requires: 

  • Keyword Research 
  • Competitor research
  • Website Audit and Optimization
  • SEO analysis
  • Link building
  • Track Rankings

Black Hat Vs White Hat SEO Strategies

White hat SEO strategies have slow growth because it plays by Google’s rules, but are less risky as a result. If black hat SEO strategies go wrong, Google will block the site from further access.

Black Hat SEOWhite Hat SEO
Black hat SEO strategies focus on gaining rank using deceptive methods like plagiarism, link-farming, and hiding keywords in the code.White Hat SEO strategies focus on making the content easily accessible and user-friendly and achieving higher rankings by offering a better user experience for your site.
Black hat SEO publishes content by violating Google’s guidelines so as to rank high.Publishing high-quality content that is beneficial to the users.
The content is keyword-rich and overstuffed for search engine crawlers to pick the websites.It involves integrating specific targeted keywords into your content.
Targets the search engine bots and mostly focuses on gaining better rankings.Targets human users and focuses on becoming an authentic and reputable website in a niche or industry.
An example of a Black Hat SEO technique is creating blogs and guest posts to build backlinks.An example of a White Hat SEO technique is quality inbound link building and using structural markup.

Closing Thoughts

SEO campaigns rely upon web scraping extensively. With web scraping, you can automatically extract data from your competitor’s website. When you scrape using your public IP address, and you risk the website banning your IP address. 

Banning is just the start, as search engines will include your IP in blacklists that they share to spread caution in the network. The SEO proxies ensure that it conducts your SEO campaigns with full anonymity, speed, reliability, and without errors.

ProxyScrape offers residential proxies to scrape massive amounts of data from websites. You may use these proxies for SEO monitoring and follow white hat SEO strategies. There is a flexible combination of proxies to choose from and the pricing is also affordable. 

Keep checking our blog for more information on the newly introduced proxies, their uses, and the benefits ProxyScrape offers.