It may seem strange, but it is good to know that many people in the SEO field use Black Hat SEO techniques to achieve high rankings. Using black hat techniques may work in short term, but in long term, it will remove your website from Google’s results list. In this article, we will introduce you black hat SEO techniques.
What is black hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is a method used against search engine guidelines to get a website to rank higher in search results. These tactics are not good for searchers and are often penalized by search engines. Black hat methods include keywords, cloaking, and use of private link networks. Appearing in search results is important for business growth and development, but there are right and wrong ways to do search engine optimization. Black hat SEO is also one of those wrong ways. Black hat SEO seeks to trick search engine algorithms rather than answering user questions and needs. It uses suspicious tactics to increase your ranking. Consistent use of black hat SEO techniques may hinder your search engine presence rather than improve it. If you are new to search space, a search engine goal like Google is to provide the best results to the user when they complete a search. They want people to have a good search experience and to make sure the results they get aren’t useless or spammy content. They either do this through automated algorithms or through manual actions aimed at identifying and penalizing those who use black hat SEO.
Search engine algorithms often become more complex over time, which is why you should never use black hat SEO. White hat SEO is a better way to do search engine optimization. White hat SEO is a method that complies with the rules and guidelines set by search engines. White hat SEO involves creating quality content and a better user experience for people who visit your website.
Black Hat SEO vs. White Hat SEO
Black hat SEO goes against the guidelines set by search engines and manipulates them to achieve higher rankings. This can cause your website to be removed from search results completely or to receive a lower position. White hat SEO ensures high-quality content and a good user experience. This article will show you what black hat SEO methods exist, so you can make sure to avoid them when designing your organic search strategy.
Black Hat SEO Features
It is fast but not sustainable. These methods may quickly improve a website’s ranking, but once detected by the search engines, the website may be penalized and removed from the results. Black hat SEO techniques violates search engine rules.
High risk of penalties: Search engines like Google are constantly updating their algorithms to detect and penalize websites that use black hat techniques.
Black Hat SEO Methods
Hidden Links
If you want to hide irrelevant links in a text from users, you should know that Google will notice it and penalize you. Any type of link that is hidden in the text by tricks like changing the text color, making the font size smaller, and placing the link in images violates Google’s guidelines and will have a lower chance of being placed in good Google results.
Overuse of an anchor text
Anchor text is an old but complex topic in SEO. Many people who is active in this field believe that anchor text which matches the source page content should be used; But you can choose to vary your anchor text but still keep it relevant to the landing page, and don’t just use one anchor text with a specific keyword. This method is one of the most common SEO tricks that many beginners use in internal and external link building without knowing it.
Hidden Content
Content hiding is one of the black hat SEO tricks. If you try to make content color to background color, cover text with an image, or even change its font and size, you are using the hidden content technique. In this method, main keywords, LSI keywords, and related phrases are hidden in the text, but they are not hidden from Google’s algorithms eyes and are easily recognized from the main phrases within the text.
Plagiarized or Duplicated Content
When you use a paragraph and content structure of an article from your website to produce other content on your website, this means you are publishing duplicate content. But using content that has a complete or similar version on other websites is called copy content. Duplicate and copy content cause confusion and prevent audience from recognizing valuable content. Therefore, take writing original and unique content seriously for all pages of your website and never go for duplicate or copy content.
Keyword stuffing in ALT tag
Keyword stuffing does not just happen within text! Filling Alt tags with primary keywords is one of the black SEO methods that severely damages a website’s ranking. The recommendation to fill in Alt tag of images is always one of the On-Page SEO factors; but this does not mean that you repeat the keyword in these tags.
Hacked Website
If a website is attacked by competitors and its HTML codes are manipulated, the website’s security will definitely be compromised and it will lose its valuable rankings in Google results. Display a warning: “this website may be hacked” At the top of the website link description, causes visitors to lose trust and website position in Google. The presence of hacked website errors and malicious codes in website’s HTML can be seen through Google Analytics and then take action to fix it.
Automated content generation
It is a black hat SEO technique in which no writer has a role in writing it, and the content is collected and produced by robots and softwares in the web. At first glance, this is an obvious method of copying content, and feedback can be gained when bots access and target the content of newly established websites. Automatic content generation can meet your needs in short term; however, this form of content generation does not create any added value for users and over time affects Google’s credibility and trust of your website and may ultimately result in heavy penalties.
gateway Pages
In SEO, there are dozens of techniques to increase a website’s ranking, and doorway pages are one of those black hat SEO tricks that are the most destructive of all. They are a collection of similar and multiple pages, created by replacing keywords to target specific and diverse search keywords from users, without paying attention to the real value of those words or their user experience, and producing useful and functional content for them.
Keyword Stuffing
It happens when you fill your text with irrelevant keywords. This is used to manipulate and trick search engine algorithms so that you appear higher in search results. Adding similar keywords and their derivatives in text without adding any value to the audience will only create a bad user experience. It may even cause your page to appear and rank in irrelevant search results. Google explains keyword stuffing this way:
- A list of unused and meaningless phone numbers.
- Long texts of city names or words that a page ranks for.
- Repetition of same words or phrases that seems excessive and unnatural.
In general, you need to create value for audience in content you write. Simply writing related words next to each other with the intention of SEOing them is considered a black SEO technique. You can check and see what your audience is searching for most before create a content. But overusing these keywords in your content is not a good idea. Instead, focus on creating useful and valuable content.
Cloaking Technique
Cloaking is a technique of showing one version of content to users and a different version to search engines. Websites often use this technique to allow content to rank for fields unrelated to the page’s topic. Spam websites use this technique to hide their content from bots.
Modifying and adapting website content for different groups of users is acceptable. For example, you might design your website to be smaller and more optimized for mobile viewing or change your website language depending on the country from which your audience visits your website. Websites like Forbes or Inc. may even change their ads that they show on a page based on circumstances. As long as you don’t change the content just to hide it from search engines, these ways are perfectly acceptable. Since there are no clear rules about what is acceptable or not, we suggest asking yourself, are the changes you are making in the best interest of your users? If the answer to this question is yes, then you can be sure that this is acceptable. You should treat search engines like real users. To see what Google thinks of your website, you can use Fetch as Google tool. To see what Google thinks of your website, you can use Fetch as Google tool.
Sneaky Redirects
In general, redirecting means sending user to a different URL than the one they originally clicked on. Black hat SEO uses these redirects for another purpose. Like cloaking that it is explained in previous section, Black hat SEO can redirect search engines to one page and other users to another page. For example, it redirects a high-authority page to an unrelated page address for search engines only to increase its ranking in Google results. However, a 301 redirect can transfer a large portion of one page authority to another.
In other words, someone who uses black hat SEO techniques uses redirects to manipulate search results. Redirects should only be used for the purpose for which they were created. When you are going to change a domain address or integrate two contents in a page. JavaScript-based redirects are also acceptable in some specific circumstances. For example, in LinkedIn, when you log in to your account, it shows you full version of other users’ profiles. Otherwise, you will see the public version of the profiles. Sneaky Redirects violate search engines guidelines like Google and Yandex and should be avoided.
Using low-quality content
It is a common black hat SEO method that neither users nor Google like. Copied and duplicated content published on websites by bots or authors is a clear example of low-quality content. Panda algorithm was created in 2011 to solve the problem of creating low quality content. At that time, many websites that had copied their content from other sources were identified by this algorithm and got serious damage in their Google results rankings. Since then, Google has become much more powerful in identifying low quality and duplicate content.
Bait and switch technique
In this model, you create content on a topic you want to rank for. Once the page has a good position in the search results, you replace it with another piece of content. This will create a very unpleasant experience for your audience, because users expect to find the topic they searched for after clicking on your website page link.
Paid and malicious external links (Buy Backlinks)
Search engines like Google have strictly prohibited links buying and selling. They have announced on their website “any link created with the purpose of manipulating and deceiving the page rank in Google is against Google’s rules.” If you are unsure what links are not acceptable, you can check the FTC guidelines section. It is better to avoid paying money to other websites to place links on them, because Google will penalize both side the buyer and seller websites as a result of this action. If you have purchased backlinks before reading this article, it is time to remove them as soon as possible. If you have access to website’s Search Console, you can use the disavow links tool to disable links.
Misuse of Structured Data or Rich Snippets
They allow you to specify how your content appears on Google search results pages. This will make your content stand out and be seen among other competitors. Black hat SEO may try to deceive search engines by manipulating and providing false information in this section. For example, through fraudulent methods, a content may be rated 5 out of 5. It is recommend that you do not use these methods at all. Because Google always encourages its users to report such websites so that they are penalized.
Spam comments in blogs
This method involves adding a website link in comment section of other websites. Of course, this happens less nowadays because Google’s algorithms in new updates are able to identify these comments and disable the links. This means that the links are published as no follow, telling Google robots not to follow them. As a result, the page credibility will not be transferred elsewhere. If you own a website that has a comment section, it’s recommended that you properly monitor the comments. Google penalizes pages with a lot of spam comments and gradually removes them from the search results page.
Link Farms
A link farm is a website or collection of several websites created solely for building backlinks purpose. Each backlink is given to websites that want to rank higher in Google. Link farms usually have low-quality content and a large number of links. These links typically include the keyword you want your website to rank for. Search engines like Google will simply identify these links and block them. Therefore, it is better to avoid it.
Using low-quality private blogs and spam network for external linking (PBN)
Private Blog Network, They are a collection of reputable websites that were created solely for building external links. These networks work similarly to link farms to increase the backlinks number to a website, except that each PBN website only points to one website and they do not link to each other. See the following example:
In black hat SEO, a private network is created in which the individual purchases several related and authoritative domains. Then it places content similar to its own website content in them and adds links to it from their desired site. In this situation, the website owner hopes that search engines will not notice their control over this network and will rank well in Google results. The issue that should not be ignored is; search engines have become smarter in identifying PBN backlinks and will penalize them if such cases are detected. Instead of wasting time building fake websites, focus on creating quality content. Publishing valuable content on a consistent basis can increase your website’s credibility and encourage others to link to your website.
