What is black hat in SEO?
Using techniques and methods to manipulate and trick the search engines into giving your website a higher ranking.
Sometimes people refer to black-hat SEO as being illegal. This is not true, there is nothing illegal about black-hat SEO unless you start hacking third-party websites for your own means – and even then I’m not sure if it’s illegal.
The search engines all have their webmaster guidelines and don’t want people to try and manipulate their search algorithms to trick it into giving a site a better ranking. It’s in their interest to propagate the myth that Black-hat SEO is bad.
Black-hat SEO is not bad. It’s morally questionable and a short term tactic, but it’s not wrong or illegal. There are probably loads of people that employ black hat SEO tactics to rank a website for a few weeks or months until it gets de-indexed by Google and they start over again.
Search engines want to deliver relevant results to a user’s search term. A website owner wants to capture some of that traffic. Some website owners are so motivated to capture that traffic that they start using SEO techniques that the search engines discourage.
According to the search engines, website owners should focus on creating excellent content that focuses on the user intent. The problem is that the competition is so high that creating content that stands out is becoming increasingly more expensive.
A website like this one (seoglossary.co) has little chance of standing out in the crowd against sites like Backlinko, Neil Patel, Hubspot, Search Engine Journal, and other SEO sites. It’s not because the content is bad, it’s because the other sites have the time and money to make incredible content.
This inability to compete might seem unfair to some website owners, which is when they start looking at black-hat SEO techniques to even the playing field.
Black Hat SEO is like the dark side of the Force. It’s got strong appeal because it potentially offers an easier route to success, without investing time and money in content which may or may not be successful.
Historically black-hat SEO consisted of simple things like:
- stuffing keywords on the page or using hidden text (white font on a white background, or using CSS to position the text off screen)
- creating thousands of ‘doorway’ pages using auto-generated or ‘spun’ content
- blog comment spam
- Link cloaking to show search engines one piece of content and website visitors another
- Creating dozens of backlinks with the same anchor text to trick the search engines into thinking that the website is exceptionally relevant for that keyword
No one does these things anymore because they don’t work – or if they are doing these things then they are amateurs 🙂
Modern-day black-hat SEO techniques include:
- Private blog networks – website owners create a network of blogs that they own all linking back to the money site.
- Scanning WordPress sites for known vulnerabilities in themes and plugins and using that to inject blog posts on to the site without the owner knowing
- Similar to above, but a redirect code is injected that redirects users to that website to your website, but is smart enough to allow search engine robots to continue indexing that website
- Scanning web servers for known vulnerabilities and using that to inject HTML files with content that links back to your site
- Referral traffic spam where a website owner sees a lot of referral traffic coming from a particular domain and they visit that domain to see why. The traffic is likely bot traffic and the page is usually trying to sell a product or service
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