Ten years ago; SEO was frequently viewing as a way to game the search engine algorithms for the higher rankings. This leads to adopting the Black Hat SEO Techniques, system of manipulative tactics to exploit the weakness in search engine algorithms. These unethical methods, while once is effective in boosting the rankings quickly.
In today’s era, search engine prioritize mainly on the user experience and quality of content that may punish the websites which uses the deceptive SEO methods. Instead of depending on the risky shortcuts, some business may focus on the ethical long term strategy that mainly aligns with Google Webmaster Guidelines.
In this guide, we’ll break down what is black hat SEO and why preventing it is important for winning the sustainable online success.
What is Black Hat SEO?
The Black Hat SEO states the techniques that are using to increase the visibility of websites in a search engine by breaking the guidelines of Search Engine.
In case of GOOGLE, this mainly consists of breaking down the webmasters guidelines. When Google analyze the black hat SEO techniques, this may leads to penalizing the websites mainly thorough a manual action, de indexing and usually reducing the visibility of the website on the SERP ie Search Engine Result Page.
If Google decides the use of multiple H1 tags is considering as the black hat technique. So, they may change their guidelines and start punishing the websites either legally or illegally.
Do You Know? Google updates itself timely to catch the most popular techniques of black hat. The Google penguin upgrades the low quality content that maintained by the spammy links.
Timely, Google is releasing updates to crash-out the black hat tricks. The results generated through this are for short period. Time and money which spent on these tactics are wasted; if it is caught by Google and may also punish the websites.
Always Keep Away from Black Hat SEO: Reasons
These Black Hat SEO tactics banned website from both GOOGLE and the other kinds of search engines. It is vital to prevent the Black Hat SEO and move with the validation instead of White Hat SEO.
Get short term success get derive by the increased traffic to your website. The penalties charged by the Google are more and more sophisticated and have the harmful effects on your rankings as well as traffic.
Search Engines Detect to Black Hat SEO: How it Possible?
How the Search Engines analyze Black Hat SEO which is a black box. From updates to search engine algorithms, companies like GOOGLE have discovered the means to detect the practices of black Hat SEO.
Google mainly release the algorithms updates to target the black hat SEO:
| Jagger | Black-hat link making way, like paid backlinks, cloaking, and more |
| Panda | Thin and/or low-quality sites, including link farms |
| Penguin | Spammy sites, like those using keyword stuffing and link schemes |
| Payday Loan | Spammy sites, like those using spamdexing |
| Spam | Spam content |
| Link Spam | Sites using sketchy backlink tactics |
Black Hat SEO Technique & Methods
In this section; our team will explain in detail about all effective methods of Black Hat SEO that can harm your website’s ranking. Let’s start one by one:
Duplicate Content
This is a black hat method where identical or highly same contents seem to appear on the multiple pages or the websites. This is bad for search engines and lower rankings. Google do not consider the duplicate content or copied.
To prevent any kind of penalty create unique and different valuable content for a better user experience.
Keyword Stuffing
It is a black hat SEO tactic where excessive keywords get force into the content to target the search engines. Keyword stuffing consists of too much repetition of the words and the phrases to reject the search engine algorithms.
This practice mainly harms the user experience and even lead to more punishments. Focus on the organic keywords integration and the good quality content for getting sustainable success of SEO.
Cloaking
It is a black hat SEO technique that moves the search engines by displaying the unique content to them what the user actually see. This is mainly done to improve the rankings and mislead search engines as well as visitors.
The following are the two common ways to use cloaking:
Simple and heavy text page helps the search engines to display a rich page using CSS, JavaScript and imagers to the audience.
Placing keywords that are hidden is only visible to the search engines bots but not to the human visitors.
Websites that use the cloaking method, severe penalties get charge as this way violates the guidelines. Accessing cloaking reduces the rankings and completely removes from the search engines.
The legal SEO mainly focuses on the transparency and offer the reliable and relevant content to both users as well as the search engines.
This is going to perform in two ways:
Displaying an HTML text page to the search engines, while showing a page that fully designed by CSS, JS and the image heavy content to users.
Embedded keywords into a page that displays this page only when the user crawls this specific page in a search engines not as a human guest.
Buying Links
Purchasing links is a deceptive way that is available in the list of Black Hat SEO strategies where the websites pay for the backlinks to level up the rankings.
Many of these agencies mainly provide the low quality and can harm your sites credibility. Focus on earning the natural, high quality backlinks through the ethical SEO strategies.
Invisible Text or Links
This technique involves the white text on the white background. The main aim is to make the text color to the background color. Through this, owners of the websites hide the keywords from the audience that make it visible to the GOOGLE bot. This practice allows clearly executing to carry out the links.
Spamming in Blog Comments
Adding comments on the blog pages, with the link to their websites is a strategy. This is a pure and the sparingly done by the expectations of getting backlinks from the specified website. The GOOGLE never agreed these links from the blogs; instead of, webmasters are even set the link as no-follow.
Doorway pages have another name the bridge or jumping pages that design to boost the particular keywords; but do not offer any real value to the users. These pages redirect the visitors to an unrelated or the low quality destinations.
Doorway Pages
So, they may mislead both users and search engines as they may lead to high punishments. This may includes the reduced ranking or de indexed pages.
Link Farming
This is special group of websites that allow to exclusively for link building. Each site has link farm points to a website that ranks higher on the all search engine’s SERP (Search Engines Result Pages).
Crawlers rank a website by the considerations on the number of the websites that points among the other elements. Black hat SEO technique makes use of this by maximizing the number of backlinks for a particular site that gets from such link farms.
Incorrect Re-Directs
These are a great technique that is using to redirect the user to the proper functioning of the current page which faces many problems.
The webmaster always uses 301 redirects to result the users to another page altogether. Google bot and the users by displaying on a page with a bad URL; which they didn’t intend to visit.
Private Blog Networks (PBN)
PBN stands for ‘Private Blog Network’ that is a group of authority websites that mainly uses the link building purposes. Use of the low quality links are to main website with the intention of influencing the search engines.
These sites mainly link to the main website instead of another. This method makes uses of the domains as that expired before to gain the authority. PNB is one of the main black hat SEO techniques that purchased to be made into the private blogs to create the outbound links.
Bait and Switch
Accessing Bait and Switch is the starting step that involves the writing a page for GOOGLE which mainly consists of keywords. But, after ranking improves; it changes into the different products and projects.
Audience gets to see something different from the topic they choose. This practice is also termed as page swapping which is used to target the users and the search engines. These unethical practices combine to form a black hat SEO.
Clickbait
This is an impressive and noticeable headline that is written to temp the users to choose for the links. This is a copywriting approach that is using to draw the kind attention by emphasizing a topic that encourages the users to click on the links that is irrelevant content. These methods are using to derive the income from the number of click on those links.
Overly Optimized Pages
Excessive optimization is dangerous for a website. The black hat SEO tactics consists of too much use of on page elements such as keyword stuffed tiles, over optimized anchor text and excessive number of the internal links.
However, SEO is essential and overdoing can trigger the penalties of search engines. Balanced approach and focusing on the user experience is the key for sustainable rankings.
Guest Post Spam
This technique is also using to acquire the backlinks from the messages which are sent to the bloggers to publish the article that is irrelevant with a do- follow link.
Links to these articles in between the guest blogging activities affect a site ranking. Despite of poor quality, the linked blogs are posted on the websites that are irrelevant just for building the links.
Negative SEO
This practice also comes in the list of black hat techniques to improve the rankings in search engines. Here are few steps include:
- Website hacking
- Make lot of spammy links for the targeting website
- Copy the content from other webpage and then use it all over the internet
- Provide link juice to the website using various kinds of keywords
Automated Google Queries
In this practice, software is using to generate the automated searches for the specified keywords to make the site rank higher in Search Engine Result Page. The queries generated automatically are not allowing without the prior permissions by GOOGLE. These queries mean that the software uses to expand the total searches for particular keywords to rank higher in SERP.
Rich Snippet Mark-Up Spam
The rich snippets offer the more information that is about the content in a website. Webmaster can easily change the snippet in a way that gets show from the competitors that appears on SERP.
This is best opportunity that is being misused by the spammers that Google issued strictly as ‘report rich snippet spam tool’.
The web admins the mark up the content that is not visible to the users or provides misleading the unrelated content, videos and reviews it is considering rich snippet spamming.
This offers the false reviews and the ratings, inaccurate or misleading the information which is fake and non existence.
AI-Generated Content
Using AI to generate the content is a black hat technique that results in low quality, repetitive and an unnatural content. Some practices like prioritizing valuable content and user focused content penalizes the search engines.
To prevent penalties, the text generated by AI must be reviewed, refined and properly optimized by the human editors.
All these practices may end by getting penalized by the GOOGLE which considers your efforts as a black hat technique.
Article Spinning
This tool belongs to the black hat techniques which is one of the popular. The search engines appreciate the content that is great and spun the article which can be highly punished by the Google.
Use the proper synonyms and manipulate the sentence structure when the content is rewritten. The main focus is to spin the articles is to spin the thousand of the words and post it to many websites.
The articles that are spun are not unique and do not provide any helpful information which are non readable.
How Can You Resolve The Black Hat SEO Penalty?
If you seem that your site get penalized by GOOGLE once, your site traffic will go downwards. It is important to understand why this penalty is charged and how it can be solved.
- Remove keyword stuffing
- Resolve a hacked website
- Disavow backlinks
- Rewrite thin or low-quality pages
You can even submit a request for the reconsideration when you receive the manual penalty. These penalties need waiting because search engines identify your fixes which may even take month to solve.
Difference Between White Hat and Black Hat SEO Techniques
SEO needs the approach that aligns with the various search engine algorithms. The black hat SEO techniques help to prevent them at any costs.
White hat SEO enhances your search engine ranking ethically and also follows up by their guidelines. The strategies aims on boosting your site rank high on SERPs which delivers the excellent user experience to human website visitors.
However, these Black Hat SEO Techniques do not follow up the search engine company terms. They use manipulation to acquire the higher search engines rankings.
This even results in a penalty and complete eradication from the search engine results pages.
Black Hat SEO Tools List
The following is a list of common black hat SEO tools:
ScrapeBox: This tool is using for comment spamming and the scraping of content.
XRumer: Forum profile and blog comment spamming.
GSA Search Engine Ranker: Automated backlink building.
SEnuke: Automates content spinning, link building, and more.
Ultimate Demon: Backlink and social bookmarking automation.
Magic Submitter: Submits content across different platforms.
BlackHatWorld Tools: Several communities and groups post shared
ArticleForge: Auto-generates spun content.
RankerX: Used to make an automated building of links across 2.Os
Clad Genius: Used for classified ad posting automation.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
Can We Recover Website from Google Penalty for Black Hat SEO?
Sure! Website can be easily recovering from GOOGLE penalty by analyzing and rectifying the black hat tactics. Once them, submit the request and illustration of a commitment to follow up the ethical SEO practices. The process of recovery can be time consuming and it may include the trust that rebuilds with the search engines.
Today, Does Black Hat SEO Still Working?
Yes! But, this technique works for your site in short period of time. By performing this black hat SEO will punish your which may leads to drop in the search results or being removed by the SERPs.
What Are Black Hat SEO Examples?
The Black Hat SEO techniques consists of keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, farm links , pages of doorway, artificial content and purchasing the backlinks to change the rankings.
Last Thoughts: Black Hat Techniques
At the final; black hat SEO seems very simple and fast way, but it is a harmful game with the serious consequences. Destroying your website’s reputation to losing the trust of the users, the risks get overweigh and may take any short term benefits.
Think about long term investment for your website. A strong, trustworthy and an online presence take time and effort which will pay off in the long time. Play this game safely and smartly is important. White hat SEO tactics align the guidelines of the search engines which prioritize the user’s experience. This aims on creating a high quality content which helps you to gain your audience. This requires some time to display the results.