What is Black Hat SEO (Black Hat) ?

Before we dive into the various black hat SEO techniques, let’s first understand what black hat is and why it has gained notoriety in the SEO industry.

Black Hat SEO is a set of unscrupulous practices designed to increase your rankings in Google search results. These methods are called “black hat” because they are against the search engine rules as laid out by Google.

Some commonly used black hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, masking, paid links, doorway pages, hidden content, and duplicate content. Let’s discuss each of them in detail.

10 Black Hat SEO Methods

 

1. Excessive keyword density on the page

Keyword stuffing is the insertion of multiple keywords into one sentence. This method refers to stuffing the page with keywords in order to rank higher in the search results.

Repetition and paraphrasing of the same words and sentences is done in order to manipulate the search robots and get a higher ranking.

2. Content duplication

This is one of the techniques in which the content from one page is simply copied by the site owner onto his own site. Stealing someone else’s goods is a crime, right? The same applies to content. Google strongly opposes this practice and prioritizes the original source of the content.

3. Masking or cloaking

When using cloaking or masking, search robots and users are shown different content on the pages. Regular visitors see standard-readable text, while search engines see keyword-rich content.

Considered a hack, this practice involves showing one version of your site to the Google bot and another version to the user.

This is done in two ways:

• Displaying an HTML text page for search engines while simultaneously displaying a page full of CSS, JS, and image-heavy content for users.

• Embedding text or keywords in a page and displaying that page only when the user agent crawling the page is a search engine and not a user.

4. Links purchased and rented

It’s bad practice for a site owner to pay money to another site to give it a backlink. There are many agencies selling such paid links, which are often of very poor quality. You would be better off without such purchased links on your site.

Sometimes, optimizers start buying links to quickly increase the ranking of the site. These backlinks are not always from good authority sites (DA), and they can either be from a niche unrelated to yours or from domains that promote spam content.

If a site has inbound links from such domains, it actually damages their authority and backlink quality, which greatly affects site rankings and DA. Stop buying leased links and start building a quality link strategy.

5. Doorway Entry Pages

These landing pages are specifically designed for focused queries and are designed to rank for specific keywords. These pages provide no value to the user and are used solely to fool the search engine and move the guest from the search query to another web page, i.e., to an unspecified destination.

These pages are filled with content that has little or no value for the user but is full of keywords and CTAs. When the end user clicks on these pages, they are taken to a different landing page. Therefore, these pages are also considered a modified form of redirect.

6. Dorway Link Farming

A link farm (doorway) is a site or a group of sites created solely for the purpose of creating links and promoting another project. Usually, a lot of resources are created that are filled with a large number of keywords.

Each site in such a link farm points to a particular site that should rank higher on the search engine result pages. Usually, a lot of resources are created that are filled with a large number of keywords.

 

Search engine crawlers rank a site based on the number of sites it links to. In Black Hat SEO technology, this is used to increase the number of backlinks that a particular site receives from such link farms.

7. Transparent text or links

This technique involves placing white text on a white background. The principle is to blend the text color with the background color. In this way, website owners hide their keywords from users but make them visible to the Google bot. A similar practice is followed for references.

8. Spam blog comments

This is a strategy that involves adding comments to blog pages along with a link back to the site. This is done solely in order to get a backlink from this site. Search engines now ignore such links from blog comments.

Commenting on blogs with links to your site is a spamming method, and we strongly recommend that you avoid this practice. Search engines will completely remove spam pages from their search results.

9. Incorrect redirection

A redirect (redirect) is a great technique to redirect the user to a properly functioning page if there are problems on the current page. Site owners often use 301 redirects in these cases.

However, black hat “experts” use such redirects to take the user to another page. They deceive both the Google bot and the users by displaying a page with an invalid URL that they did not intend to visit.

 

10. Overly Optimized Pages

You know the saying: too much of something bad for you? The same applies to your pages. Sometimes SEO professionals are so busy trying to optimize their pages that they end up doing it unnecessarily.

This includes using many elements on the page, such as over-optimized anchor text, a large number of internal links, content, titles, and descriptions with keywords.

Why Should You Avoid Black Hat SEO?

While black hat SEO is not illegal, it does violate the webmaster guidelines set by search engines. In other words, it’s still against the rules. This means that if you are doing black hat SEO, you should be prepared to receive a nasty fine as punishment.

Getting penalized by search engines will cause your site to drop in search results, or worse, it may be removed entirely. This means that your site will receive less traffic and, ultimately, fewer customers.

Search engines are getting better and better at finding black-hat SEO techniques. While you may see short-term benefits from a black hat, SEO will recognize over time that your black hats are detrimental to your search presence.