Black Hat SEO: What It Is and Why To Avoid It

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What is Black Hat SEO
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  • Post last modified:July 29, 2022

Black hat SEO may sound like a shortcut to improving your rankings and gaining more visibility in search. But think twice before engaging in these tactics. Black hat techniques can hurt your SEO more than they can help.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is a set of practices that go against search engine guidelines and are used to boost a website’s search rankings. Black hat SEO techniques ignore searcher intent and attempt to bypass best practices by cheating the system and gaining search visibility through unscrupulous practices.

To compare black hat vs. white hat SEO:

  • Black Hat SEO exploits search engine guidelines to boost rankings.
  • White Hat SEO closely follows search engine guidelines to boost rankings.

Some marketers use black hat SEO over white hat SEO techniques because they think they can improve their search visibility faster or cheaper by gaming search engine algorithms.

But black hat SEO can hurt your long-term SEO much more than it can help.

#BlackHat SEO tactics can actually hurt your long-term SEO much more than it can help.Click to tweet

Why Black Hat SEO is Risky and Can Hurt Your Site

Black hat SEO can harm your website and brand in multiple ways.

  1. It can lead to lower search rankings or even cause a site to disappear from search results entirely. Because black hat SEO techniques go explicitly against search engine terms of service, search engines may penalize and even ban sites from appearing on their search results pages if they engage in these tactics.
  2. It only creates short-term results (if any). Because black hat strategies exploit loopholes in search guidelines, the results earned through the tactics will disappear once the loophole is fixed. This happens continuously, as search engines always look for and fix loopholes that people use to game the system.
  3. It creates a poor, annoying, or misleading experience for audiences. Many black hat tactics create a poor user experience, which can cause users to leave a page. It can also make a brand look spammy and untrustworthy.

If you want to gain long-term search visibility and build trust with users, avoid black hat SEO. Stick with ethical and sustainable best practices for SEO.

If you want to gain long-term search visibility and build trust with users, avoid black hat SEO.Click to tweet

9 Black Hat SEO Techniques

To avoid displeasing search engines and users, focus on white hat SEO techniques and avoid the following black hat SEO tactics.

1. Publishing a Bunch of Low-Quality Content

Search engines prefer websites that have a lot of high-quality content. Because high-quality content isn’t easy or cheap to create, many black hat marketers try to beat the system by publishing low-quality, low-value, cheap content.

Instead of this black hat tactic, create relevant and valuable SEO content for readers that answers search intent.

2. Keyword Stuffing and Duplicate Content

Keyword stuffing is using a keyword excessively in your content to try and get search engines to rank the page for the target term. A page may be using keyword stuffing if its keyword density percentage is very high.

Duplicate content is publishing the same content on multiple website pages to attract search engines. Both of these tactics generally go against search engine guidelines.

Instead of keyword stuffing and duplicate content, use keyword optimization best practices and a duplicate content checker to ensure your pages send the appropriate signals to search engines.

3. Cloaking

Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique that tricks search engines into ranking content for a specific search term that isn’t tied to the webpage’s context. Cloaking shows one piece of content to users while showing a different piece of content to search engines.

4. Using Misleading Redirects

False redirects are another black hat trick that misleads audiences and search engines. A redirect link is set up that leads users and search engines to different pages. Alternatively, a high-quality page is redirected to a low-quality page in an attempt to boost the low-quality page’s search rankings.

5. Buying Backlinks

Getting a lot of high-quality sites to link to your site is an off-page SEO technique that can boost search rankings. Instead of organically earning high-quality backlinks, black hat marketers may pay websites to link to their site.

6. Using Link Farms and Private Blog Networks

Link farming and private blog networks are other ways black hats try to quickly and inorganically build links. In this situation, the marketer uses or pays to use a network of websites created solely to link to sites that want to improve their search rankings.

7. Spamming Blog Comments

In another attempt to gain links back to their website, a marketer using black hat SEO may comment on dozens and dozens of blog posts with links back to their website.

8. Abusing Structured Data

Structured data or schema markup is code added to a webpage to tell search engines what rich information to display on search results pages. Black hat SEO manipulates structured data to get search engines to display false information in search results.

9. Negative SEO or Falsely Reporting Competitor Sites

Negative SEO is a tactic used to make it look like a competing site is engaging in black hat SEO. The goal of this tactic is to get competitors penalized by search engines. Making it appear that another site is engaging in black hat SEO or falsely claiming that they are and reporting it to the search engine are two unsavory black hat tactics.

When (and How) to Report Black Hat SEO

There are times when it may be appropriate to report a website that is going against search engine guidelines.

For example, you may wish to file a report if you see:

  • Sites engaging in the black hat SEO tactics listed above
  • A spammy top-ranking result for a keyword
  • Another website engaging in negative SEO tactics against you
  • Another website has falsely reported you

File a complaint through Google’s webspam report, or disavow backlinks with Google’s tool to tell the search engine that a low-quality site is maliciously linking to yours. You can also report black hat SEO tactics through Bing’s content removal feature.

Avoid Black Hat Tactics and Stick with White Hat SEO

Black hat SEO may look like a quick way to game the system and boost your search rankings. But it’s an unethical practice that can permanently hurt your search visibility and brand credibility.

Use a Site Audit tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or SEO Power Suite to scan your site for potential black hat SEO problems. The reports highlight issues related to quality, duplicate content, and redirects.

Run a Site Audit to identify Black Hat SEO
Run a Site Audit to identify Black Hat SEO

Focus on developing a white hat SEO plan that will give your brand long-term SEO results and lasting brand credibility

Daniel Stanica

Daniel is the founder of Competico digital agency. For over 15 years he has helped hundreds of digital businesses to win the digital race through SEO, Marketing Strategy, Competitive Intelligence and Affiliate Marketing.

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