What is Black Hat SEO? Here’s Everything You Should Know

Knowing the difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO is extremely important to ensure that all your hard work doing SEO drives positive results. If you are putting all your time and effort into doing SEO on your website and still not getting results, you are probably using some wrong techniques. And if any of your strategies involve black hat SEO, all your hard work may just backfire one day.

In order to build trust with search engines, it is essential that you create and publish content that aligns with their guidelines. And if you are not doing so, you are following black hat SEO, which can be very harmful to your website in the long term. Let us diver deeper into understanding what black hat SEO is and what some black hat SEO techniques to avoid:

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO refers to the SEO techniques that one uses to trick search engines. You are following black hat SEO if you are using tactics like keyword stuffing, link spamming, etc, instead of publishing high-quality well-optimized content on your website. Black hat SEO was once useful for websites when Google’s search algorithms were not so transparent.

Website owners used to make tons of money using these spammy techniques, but they do not work any longer. Now, Google has improved its search algorithms with advanced technologies. All the major search engines like Google prioritize good quality content that is actually relevant to the user and not such content that is just created to manipulate search engines.

Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO

White hat SEO is just the opposite of the black hat SEO. White hat SEO techniques align with the guidelines of major search engines like Google and aim to improve user experience. It aims for the long-term growth of a website by building trust with search engines and creating high-quality content to improve user experience. Some common examples of white hat SEO tactics include creating high-quality content, using keywords where they seem appropriate, optimizing websites for better responsiveness and mobile friendliness, and earning quality backlinks from reputed websites.

On the other hand, black hat SEO techniques do not follow Google’s guidelines and aim to manipulate search engines to get higher rankings instead of improving user experience. These techniques may give short-term results like improvements in rankings but once Google discovers them, the website may get penalized and lose all its traffic.

Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid

Here are a few black hat SEO techniques with examples that you must avoid to maintain the integrity of your website and improve its search engine rankings in a good manner:

1. Keyword Stuffing

While it’s important to use keywords that you want to rank for in a piece of content, overusing them is a bad practice. It is known as keyword stuffing and is one of the common black hat SEO tactics. Earlier, website owners used keyword stuffing to make their web pages rank for a particular search term or phrase and unfortunately, they were successful in achieving top rankings. This ultimately led to more and more people doing keyword stuffing in their content instead of producing quality content that is actually helpful for the users.

But now, Google strictly recommends avoiding such tactics. If you don’t want to attract the risk of your website getting penalized by Google, make sure that you are not overusing keywords in your articles, blogs, or any other type of content. The keyword should be there in prominent places like the title, meta description, subheadings, etc, but should not seem like forcefully added. It leads to frustration in users and ultimately encourages them to leave your website.

2. Buying Backlinks

Link building is an essential factor in SEO, but buying spammy links is again a black hat SEO practice. If too many websites and pages link to your content, Google considers your site trustworthy and authoritative. But if these links look spammy, the impact can be exactly the opposite. Instead of buying links from any random website that are not even relevant to your brand can make search engines doubt the authoritativeness of your website. If you somehow get caught by Google in buying backlinks, your website may get penalized and lose its traffic. Your focus should be on building high-quality backlinks that are relevant and organic.

3. Article Spinning

Article spinning is another black hat SEO technique that you should avoid if you want your website to look trustworthy and reliable. It’s very similar to plagiarism. Some website owners just copy and paste content from other websites and rephrase the entire article or blog sentence by sentence to make it look original. However, Google’s algorithm is powerful enough to recognize such articles and restrict them from ranking among top search results.

Yes, it’s important to read articles published on other websites and take inspiration from them. But you can’t just use their entire idea in your blogs. Your content should look original and unique. To make it unique, you can add something new like the opinion of the industry expert from your organization. The content of your website should be well written, keeping in mind your target audience and your brand’s tone of voice.

4. Hidden Content

Hidden content refers to content that is made of the same color as the background to manipulate search engines. While this content is not visible to readers, search engines can see it while crawling or indexing a webpage. The aim of adding hidden content is usually to add the keyword or search phrases as many times as possible without making the content look keyword-stuffed. But, you can no more trick search engines like that. Google’s algorithm can definitely tell the difference between keywords that are hidden and keywords that are within the body of a paragraph. So, using hidden content will not help you but only make your content look spammy to search engines.

5. Misusing Schema Markup

Schema markup is a special code that helps search engines understand the context of your web pages. It’s like structured data for search engines, which helps them better understand what your content is about. When you use schema makeup, Google shows rich snippets of your web pages in search results. These rich snippets include essential information from within a webpage. Usually, such snippets have higher CTR (Click-Through-Rate) than normal web pages.

But overdoing it is considered a black hat SEO technique. If you try to cram a lot of keywords in your schema markup, Google may penalize your website. Some website owners even try to fool their users by adding inaccurate information to their web pages, which is later shown in the rick snippet of that page in search results. This is nothing but data abuse and if Google catches you doing it, you may lose most or all of your website traffic. 

6. Blog Comment Spam

Many website owners use the comment spam technique to earn free backlinks. They comment on the URL of their web pages on the blogs of other websites. Although it may be an effective technique if you comment on the link on relevant web pages, doing it with any random blog from any random website is a bad idea. If the website owner marks your comment as spam and restricts you from posting comments, you will never be able to comment on that website again. What you can instead do is comment on some helpful suggestions or tips and add a link to a relevant webpage at the end of the comment.

7. Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are different pages or websites that are created to rank for the same keyword and send the visitors to the same page. These pages target a specific long-tail keyword or phrase that aims to send the readers to the primary page. When the user clicks on the URL of the page that they want to visit, they have to go through several intermediary pages before they reach the final page.

These intermediary pages are called doorway pages and are usually irrelevant to the users. Google considers creating doorway pages a spammy practice and is constantly improving its terms to restrict such pages from ranking high in search results. If you want to improve the user experience of your website while aligning with Google’s guidelines, you should strictly avoid creating doorway pages.

Advice From SEO Experts at MadHawks

While using black hat SEO techniques might give you short-term benefits (although that’s nearly impossible now), you cannot build a long-term brand reputation using them. In order to establish the authoritativeness of your website and make it look trustworthy, try to use as many white hat SEO techniques as you can. Black hat SEO tactics, especially keyword stuffing, spammy backlinks, and doorway pages, can poorly impact your website’s rankings and traffic. White hat SEO will give slow but impactful results. If you need any further assistance with SEO or looking for a trustworthy SEO agency, contact MadHawks today!

FAQs

1. What happens if you use black hat SEO?

Ans. Using black hat SEO may give your some results (like ranking improvements) in the short-term. But once your black hat SEO techniques are discovered by Google, your website may get penalized and lose all its traffic.

2. Why Should You Avoid Black Hat SEO?

Ans. Google is constantly improving its search algorithms to recognize and penalize websites that use black hat SEO techniques to rank on Google search results. Google now prioritizes user experience. So, instead of tricking search engines, you should now focus on improving the user experience of your website.

3. Are Black Hat SEO Techniques Good For You?

Ans. Black hat SEO techniques are not good for any website and should be strictly avoided.

4. What is a black hat SEO technique?

Ans. A black hat SEO technique is a technique that website owners use to improve their search engine rankings against Google’s guidelines. Some common examples of black hat SEO include keyword stuffing, link spamming, doorway pages, hidden content, article spinning, etc. 

5. Which strategies are considered black hat SEO?

Ans. Some common black hat SEO strategies are keyword stuffing, link spamming, hidden content, article spinning, doorway pages, blog comment spam, and misuse of schema markup.