Black hat SEO is a set of practices used to increase a site or page’s rank in search engines through means that violate a search engine’s service terms. The “black hat” refers to the hats bad guys wore in Western movies. It’s used to describe internet baddies like computer hackers, virus creators, and those who perform unethical actions with computers.
Recognized Black Hat SEO Tactics
The following are discouraged Black Hat SEO tactics that shouldn’t be exercised for those wanting to stay above board with Google and other search engines:
- Article Spinning
- Automated Queries to Google
- Cloaking
- Content Automation
- Creating pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content
- Doorway Pages
- Guest Posting Networks
- Hidden Text or Links
- Keyword Stuffing
- Link Farms, Link Wheels, or Link Networks
- Link Manipulation (including buying links)
- Link Schemes
- Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, trojans, and other malware
- Reporting a Competitor (or Negative SEO)
- Rich Snippet Markup Spam
- Sneaky Redirects
Why Should You Avoid Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO tactics and strategies can get a site banned from search engines. These methods might bring short-term success through increased site traffic, but Google can apply penalties that can have devastating effects on your traffic and rankings. It’s unfortunate getting de-indexed considering the hundreds of millions of users searching on Google per day.
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