Common Black Hat SEO Practices

Black Hat Practices are deceptive and dangerous tactics that are employed to cheat the system of search engines. They are commonly used in sneaky ways and should be avoided when creating honest content. Below are fourteen common practices that were discussed in a Search Engine Optimization class that are useful in knowing so that they can be detected and avoided.

1. Cloaking– showing different content to users than to the Googlebot
2. Doorways
   1. Pages exist for the sole purpose of redirecting traffic to another site, typically poor quality, designed to rank for a single phrase and link to multiple intermediate pages, useless from a content perspective
3. Hacked Content
   1. Content is injected into a page without the owner’s permission
   -Comes in the form of: code injection, page injection, content injection, redirects
4. Hidden text or links– designed not to be easily detected by human visitors, but which can be indexed by digital agents
   1. Identical color-on-color links or text are designed to stuff a pageHidden text behind an image
   1. Setting font size to 0
5. Keyword Stuffing
   1. Loading pages with irrelevant keywords, out of context lists, long lists of word categories, product/service oriented lists, lists of phone number
   1. Unnatural repetition of words
6. Link Spam– Any links intended to manipulate a site’s ranking in google search results
   1. Buying or selling links that pass PageRankExcessive reciprocal linksLinking to web scammers, unrelated pages intended to affect link volume etc.
   1. Partner pages designed to promote cross-linking
7. Machine-Generated Traffic– traffic that hits Google without Google’s permission
   1. Consume their resources, sending automated queries to Google
   1. Scraping results for rank-checking purposes
8. Malware & Malicious Behavior– Pages with malicious behavior
   1. Any behavior intended to harm a computer
   1. Google will block such pages in linking from the SERP
9. Misleading Functionality
   1. Promising access to
10. Scraped Content
    1. Borrowing authoritative content and modifying it slightly to use on your own site, modified, but without any real enhanced value, content delivered through content feeds without citing sources, amounts to digital plagiarism
    1. Positive Side: Content Curation
11. Sneaky Redirects
    1. Redirecting a user to a page other than the one they requested
    1. Used to be rampant on the internet
12. Spammy Auto-Generated Content
    1. Text generated by digital tools without human
13. Thin Affiliate Pages
    1. Participating in affiliate programs without adding significant value, mainly designed to route traffic for ad revenue or affiliate revenue
    1. Sometimes product descriptions
14. User Generated Spam
    1. Spammy content that might appear to be legitimate, but is not
    1. Site owner often not aware of it
       1. Spammy post on forums
       1. Comment spans on blogs
       2. Sometimes serve Adsense ads, affiliate links