Black Hat SEO Techniques: Never Use It

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Black Hat SEO Practices Why you Should
Definitely Not be Doing
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Googles first page of search engine results is a
highly competitive place these days. As Google
receives trillions of searches annually, search
engine optimization (SEO) is among the most
important tools for increasing organic traffic to
a site. There are a variety of back hat tactics,
ranging from keyword stuffing and PBNs to content
automation and tier-based link building.
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Recognized Black Hat SEO Tactics
If you wish to stay on the right side of Google
and other search engines, you should not use the
following black hat SEO tactics

• Automating content
• A Doorway Page
• Links or hidden text
• Stuffing keywords
• Falsely reporting competition
• Tricky Redirects
• Cloaking
• Link Schemes

• Networks for guest posting
• Buying links (link manipulation)
• Spinning articles
• Link Farms, Link Wheels or Link Networks
• Spam using Rich Snippet Markup
• Automated Google searches
• Duplicating content on pages, subdomains, or
  domains
• Websites that contain malware, such as phishing,
  viruses, trojans, and other threats

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Black Hat Techniques in SEO
Stuffing Keywords
In order to manipulate where your page appears on
search results pages, keyword stuffing is the
practice of stuffing your content with irrelevant
keywords. User experience is adversely affected
by adding multiple variations of keywords with no
added value. In addition, irrelevant queries may
rank your page. Heres an example of keyword
stuffing for a website selling dried spices and
herbs We sell Dried herbs and spices. Dried
herbs and spices are what we sell. Our company
will sell you dried herbs and spices. As
youll agree, that sounds a little repetitive.
Google will understand that the content is
unnatural as soon as they hear it. Finding out
what people are searching for can be done with
keyword research, but being overzealous with
these keywords is not recommended. You should
instead create content that focuses on topics
over keywords rather than stuffing it with
irrelevant keywords.
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Cloaking
A false search engine listing is displayed to
users and users are shown a different search
engine listing. The purpose of black hat SEO is
to make content rank for irrelevant search terms.
This is often done by spam websites in order to
avoid being discovered in search engine results
by search engines. Content can be tailored to
meet the needs of different groups of users.
Perhaps when someone visits your website from a
mobile device, you will reduce the websites
size. Depending on the country someone is
visiting from, a page could also be translated
into another language. It is perfectly acceptable
for such examples to occur. You may change
content as long as it is not merely modified for
search engine crawlers. My best advice is to ask
yourself whether what you intend to do will make
the user happier or less happy?
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Using Sneaky Redirects
Redirecting someone involves sending them to a
different URL than they clicked on originally. A
black hat SEO practices use redirects for
purposes other than what they were intended for.
Cloaking can be done in the same way by
redirecting a search engine crawler to one page
and all users to another. Another example is
redirected traffic from a highly authoritative
page with a lot of backlinks to another
irrelevant page for the sole purpose of
increasing its search engine ranking. 301
redirects the authority onto the new page. Using
redirects solely as a means of manipulating
search engine results is considered black hat
SEO. It is recommended to only use redirects for
the purposes they were designed for. Perhaps you
are changing the domain of your website or
combining two different types of content. On some
occasions, JavaScript can be used to redirect the
user. Take LinkedIn, for instance, which
redirects you to someones full profile when
logged in, instead of showing you the public
version of a users profile when logged out.
Avoid sneaky redirects instead. Using them will
violate search engine guidelines such as those
from Google and Yandex.
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Poor Quality Content
Another common black hat SEO practice is
producing low-quality content that offers no
value to the searcher. By scraping another
website, we mean obtaining content either by bot
or human. There was a time when search engines
like Google werent very good at detecting
duplicate content on other websites. That changed
with the Google Panda update in 2011. There was
an immediate drop in search rankings for sites
with duplicate content. The search engine giant
has improved its ability to detect duplicate and
low-quality content over the past few years. It
is also illegal to include invisible keywords in
your content. This is accomplished by making the
text the same color as the page background on
websites that engage in black hat SEO.
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Paid Links
Link-buying and link-selling are strictly
prohibited by search engines such as Google. A
link scheme or the use of free products to
manipulate Google search results is considered a
violation of Googles Webmaster Guidelines. Any
links intended to manipulate PageRank or a
websites ranking in Google search results are
prohibited. Any site that links to your content
should not be paid to link to it. People who buy
or sell links are asked by Google to tell them
about it. Once the practice is detected, they
will penalize both buyers and sellers. You
should remove your links as soon as possible if
you are reading this after purchasing links
unaware that they are black hat SEO
tactics. Disavow links also allows you to tell
Google not to use paid links when calculating
your PageRank if you are unable to get webmasters
to remove the links.
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Using Structured Data/Rich Snippets for
inappropriate purposes
Rich snippets and schema are also referred to as
structured data. Search engine results in pages
in Google can be customized by altering your
content. Your content gets more exposure on
search engine results pages when you stand out
from your competitors. Among other products and
services, structured data can be added to pages
displaying podcasts, recipes, and books. Probably
the most popular structured data format is the
reviews schema markup. The goal of black hat SEO
is to trick search engines and users by providing
misleading information in structured data.
Blackhat SEO practitioners, for example, might
display structured data that makes their results
stand out on search result pages by awarding
themselves five stars from a fake review site.
Google, for example, encourages users to report
websites with structured data misuse, so this is
a very risky practice.
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Spam Comments on Blogs
By including links to your website in blog
comments, this black hat technique is as its name
implies. As a result of search engines updating
their algorithms, links in blog comments are less
common these days. The links in blog comments
of most authoritative blogs are now nofollow by
default. The link is not followed nor does it
pass any authority to search engines such as
Google. You need to ensure the comments section
of your publication, forum or community cannot be
spammed by bots or people if you allow comments.
Spam-containing pages will be demoted or
removed from search results by search engines
like Google. One way to mitigate the risk of spam
user-generated content is to use anti-spam tools
such as Googles free reCAPTCHA tool.
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Link Farms
The term link farm describes a website or a
group of websites developed only with the goal of
generating links. Several websites link to sites
they hope to rank higher in search engine
results. Links pointing to a website are among
the factors that search engines consider when
ranking websites. This is exploited by black hat
SEO by inflating the number of backlinks a
certain site has. A link farm usually has
low-quality content and many links. Their anchor
text generally reflects the keyword they would
like the site to rank for. Using link farms
should be avoided since search engines can detect
them easily. You should instead use white hat SEO
tactics to earn backlinks naturally over time,
like creating compelling content, graphs, data,
and interviews.
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Creating a Private Blog Network
Private blog networks (PBN) consist of a
collection of highly authoritative websites used
only to build links. The aim of both is to create
as many links as possible pointing to a website.
Unlike reciprocal links, PBN sites dont link to
one another but link to the site they want to
boost in the search results.
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The Risks of Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO methods come with significant
risks, which is why many SEOs avoid using them.
This type of practice is considered unethical by
most in the SEO industry. Although marketing is
becoming increasingly organic, there will always
be a small percentage of marketers who want to
hack the system and try to gain an unfair
advantage. It is often difficult to maintain
the results of black hat SEO techniques, even if
they prove to be successful. We can clearly see
from Googles Webmaster Guidelines that the
following basic principles apply to all of their
guidelines Search engine rankings arent
improved by tricks. You should consider whether
an employee at Google or a website that competes
with you would feel comfortable explaining what
you did. The question of whether a process is
useful for my users is also a useful test. Would
I follow this if search engines didnt exist?
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Lastly
Black hat SEO practices only work for a small
period of time before search engines recognise
what you are doing and penalise you for the
practices. In the end it will cause more harm
than good for your website.
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