Black hat SEO consists of practices that go against the search engine guidelines.
Using unethical tactics to raise your organic rankings can put your site into serious trouble. You can lose your brand reputation and in worst cases your entire organic traffic.
Black hat SEO professionals use a number of techniques to game search engine algorithms to get high organic search share. You should avoid using such tactics that might invite penalties from search engines.
Let’s understand what black hat search engine optimization is and which are the most common black hat tactics to avoid. Black hat search engine optimization (SEO) refers to unethical practices used to manipulate search engine rankings. These tactics often violate search engine guidelines and can lead to penalties or even a complete ban from search results. For example, strategies like keyword stuffing, cloaking, and link farming are common techniques used in black hat SEO and should be avoided. To implement ethical and effective SEO strategies, it's essential to follow a reputable search engine optimization tutorial that emphasizes white hat tactics and long-term results.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is a set of spamdexing techniques that quickly increases a website's organic rankings in search engines but violates search engine policies.
The earliest known reference to web spam is from 1996, and the foremost methods of spamming the search results were keyword stuffing and hidden text.
Marketing professionals who use black hat techniques to optimize a website are called ‘Black Hat SEO experts’.
In black hat SEO, spammers repeat primary keywords in the meta tag and content to increase the query relevance score. Take a look at the page below, for example. It unnaturally repeats the seed keyword “firepits.”
Black hat experts might also create large-scale unnatural backlinks to artificially inflate the domain reputation.
Many sites experience a rise in organic SERP after the black hat SEO techniques are implemented. However, these results are only short-lived and once search engines algorithms identify the spammy tactics, it can lead to a page or an entire site being ranked lower.
Black Hat SEO Techniques That Lead To Search Engine Penalties
Here are the most common black hat search engine optimization techniques to avoid:
Keyword Stuffing
When you add too many keywords to a page unnaturally, it leads to keyword stuffing. Here is an example of it:
Some marketers even use invisible keywords in the HTML so that it remains visible to the search engines but not to the users.
The idea behind keyword stuffing is to make a page rank for a specific search query and to make that happen, the page is stuffed with lots of variations of exact-match of the seed keyword.
Keywords stuffing can be done in meta tags, content, and even backlink anchors. The unnatural repetition of words in your content with the sole intention to manipulate search rankings leads to search engine penalties.
Most search engines have algorithms to recognize keywords stuffing. You should avoid keyword stuffing and always write for the humans.
Link Spam
Link spam is another major black hat SEO technique that is used to create unnatural backlinks to a domain via different link schemes.
Search engines like Google use algorithms that use links as a factor to rank websites. Black hat SEO marketers use link farms, private blog networks, large-scale directory submissions, low-quality guest blogs, and unnatural link insertions as some of the methods to influence link-based ranking algorithms.
Buying or selling backlinks to manipulate search rankings is a violation of Google guidelines and might lead to penalties for unnatural links. Giving unnatural outbound links from your site and having unnatural inbound links in your backlink profile might lead to manual or algorithmic action penalties.
Here is an example of an unnatural links penalty seen in the Google Search Console for engaging in black hat SEO practice:
Duplicate Content
When the same content appears in more than one page, either in internal website pages or external domains, it is counted as duplicate content.
Each page on the web should have unique content. However, some black hat SEO practitioners copy content from the top-ranking pages and use them in the site they are promoting. Scraping content from other sites and using them as your own invites Google penalty. It can hurt your site rankings and credibility.
Also, there are some black hat SEO’s who create multiple copies of appreciable similar content pages to attract organic traffic from multiple long-tail search queries.
Cookie-cutter websites or pages having similar content with little original information also leads to severe penalties. Hence, you should make sure every page on your site contains a high amount of original, user-first, and relevant content.
Hidden Text or Links
Hidden text is the content on a page that can be read by search engine crawlers but not by humans.
Similar to hidden text, hidden links are hyperlinks created solely to unnaturally pass link equity among web pages. Hidden links can be added on text like a full stop, like in the below example:
Adding hidden text or links on your site by positioning text off-screen or using other techniques is banned by Google and other search engines. You should never use them and ensure that the content on your site is easily viewable by human visitors.
AI-Generated Content With No Human Moderation
In the age of artificial intelligence, it has become quite easy to produce low-quality content in bulk. Most AI content creators can create content at an excellent speed and website owners are using them to add lots of unuseful content on their website.
AI content generation can be useful when done with human moderation. However, using AI tools to produce poor-quality content leads to web spam.
Google says that leveraging AI to generate content with the sole intention of manipulating search rankings is a violation of their spam policies. Their SpamBrain Systems are efficient in detecting such spam.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages is an old black hat SEO technique where a number of pages are created to rank for specific search queries with the primary intention of sending the acquired traffic to the same website. Users might think they have clicked and landed on a different page, however they are redirected to the same website, which is often a malware or a phishing website.
If you have multiple pages on your site with little original content that all funnels users to one specific page, it will also be counted as a doorway page. Here is an example of a doorway page with no real content but just hyperlinks to take the user away from the current page to a different page:
Doorway pages are web spam and should be avoided. If Google Systems detects it on your website, you might face penalties.
Hacked Content
Hacked content is pure web spam, where hackers gain access to your site without permission.
If your site has malicious codes, Google displays a warning that your site is hacked.
Once they have access, they add new pages or edit the existing pages on your site with malicious scripts to attempt phishing.
To avoid being hacked via unthetical black hat practices, you should increase the security on your site by upgrading your server, using HTTPs, and using trusted plugins.
Hacked sites lose their entire organic presence, leading to a loss of rankings, traffic, and conversions.
Site Reputation Abuse
Some websites enjoy an excellent reputation to the extent that their pages rank highly in the SERP.
Black hat SEO specialists spam such sites by publishing user-generated or sponsored content on them without editor moderation.
Website owners should take special care to ensure all the content on their site passes human moderation before they are published. It helps to combat web spam.
If your site hosts such content in the form of advertising that you are finding difficult to control, you can exclude them from search indexing.
The site reputation abuse update is one of the recent web spam updates that Google did in 2024 to keep their search index clean. Here is a screenshot displaying a domain losing its rankings due to unmoderated content.
Cloaking
Cloaking means to hide something. It is one of the oldest black hat SEO methods to manipulate search results.
When you show different content to crawlers and humans to mislead both, it is known as cloaking.
Hosting content using a paywall or using excessive JavaScripts that hides the main content from the search crawlers is also a form of cloaking.
As a website owner, you should ensure that your site displays the same content to users and search engines.
Rich Snippets Abuse
The structured data you use on your site should not violate the Google content policies. The rich snippet abuse black hat SEO technique can result in a manual action. For instance, the below rich snippet preview displays a site with incorrect product ratings since the rating on the page is different to what is displayed in the snippet.
Here are some of the commonest structured data issues that might apply to your site. You should take care that rich snippets on your site do not violate the search policies.
The Dangers of Using Black Hat SEO Tactics
Here are the risks and consequences of using black hat SEO techniques:
- Damaged Site Reputation: Building a brand’s credibility is one of the hardest things to do. If you are found engaging in web spam, you risk losing your current organic position in search results. Stricter penalties like manual actions can remove your entire site from the Google index, leading to a massive decline in business credibility.
- Loss of Organic Traffic: One of the most common dangers of black hat SEO is that it leads to loss of organic traffic in the long run. Algorithmic penalties can demote a page or pages, and you lose all of its current rankings. When pages on your site that are bringing the most traffic due to higher rankings are affected, your domain’s organic search share reduces drastically.
- Poor User Experience: Imagine someone finds your site via organic search results to find gibberish content only created to manipulate search results. Or someone clicking a link on your site, which takes him away to a different website. Such issues degrade the user experience, and people will stay away from visiting your site again when they find the website spamming.
What Actions Can Google Take If I Have Used Black Hat SEO On My Website?
Google penalties are generally of two types: manual and algorithmic.
Algorithmic penalties are applied on the site automatically without human intervention. These are less-intense and your site can recover from them once you fix the issue.
Manual penalties are stricter and applied by a human reviewer. These are often site-wide and deindexes or lowers the rankings of the entire website. You receive a message in your Search Console, like the one below if such a penalty is applied in your domain.
Frequently Asked Questions About Black Hat SEO
Why do websites engage in black hat SEO?
Website owners and marketers use black hat SEO methods to get faster organic rankings and increase the percentage of organic traffic. They might engage in excessive link exchanges, build irrelevant links, use deceptive practices to increase keyword density, or use other black hat strategies. However, the rankings are often short-lived, while the consequences of it are harsh and long-term.
What is the difference between black hat and white hat SEO?
Black hat SEO consists of unethical practices not approved by Google and other search engines. White hat SEO techniques do not violate search engine guidelines. There are also search engine optimizers who use a combination of both techniques and they are known as gray hat SEOs. You should always use white hat SEO strategies to optimize your website and keep away from Google penalties.
Can I report black hat SEO to Google?
Yes, you can tell Google about the pages that use manipulative techniques to gain search engine rankings. Use this form to report spammy and deceptive web pages to Google.
How to keep my website safe from black hat SEO?
Practice white hat SEO and create high quality content. Keep your site updated with the latest security updates to avoid your site being exploited by black hat SEO practitioners. Follow Google search guidelines and check your backlinks regularly to ensure you have a natural link profile.
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