What Is Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is an unfair practice that could increase your page’s ranking of a search engine and show it on its result page.
It sounds great, but it goes at a cost of breaking the search engine’s terms of service.
This can even lead to a website being banned from the search engine itself. This is definitely not something you want to happen to a website which you so thoroughly worked on.
Types of Black Hat SEO:
- Keyword Stuffing
The most common is so-called keyword stuffing. It’s also interesting to know that once it was a used practice and wasn’t deemed as a bad one either. It is exactly what you can imagine putting too much keywords all over your website that make your content feel unnatural and definitely not user friendly.
- Duplicating Content
Another one tactic is duplicating content which basically means that a website uses copy pasted content from somewhere else. Now, as I learned, search engines are pretty smart in this aspect too. If they notice too similar contents on one URL they choose not to showcase either. Just in case.
- Cloaking
Cloaking is yet another on that makes search engines see something else than what the users really see. For example, you use different keywords than are actually used in your content.
- Link Abuse
Forms of link abuse include link farms and link buying. Link farms are websites that show hyperlinks to your website and even though they don’t lead to your website, it makes the search engine think your site is popular. That is because it appears on many other sites and makes it look trustworthy if so many other pages use the link to your site. Link buying is exactly what you think it is, you buy links so that some other website links to yours. You can even exchange links with another website and if it is done too often, Google has very strict measures that follow.
There are, of course, many more, but these are those that pop-up the most often.
Why Not to Use It?
You can already see from just a few black hat SEO tactics mentioned that it is an immoral and unfair practice to the users of your website. Someone might still think there are enough reasons to believe that black hat tactics work, but it is quickly proven to be not true.
Black hat SEO doesn’t focus on its users, the actual people, it only concentrates on search engines.
Most of those I mentioned above result in a website being banned or penalized in some sort of way. Even if the search engines – which are getting smarter in detecting black hat SEO techniques – don’t detect this unethical practice, there is a high chance it can add to a users’ poor experience as is a case of keyword stuffing.
You might ask who would even use these if you can work up naturally through quality SEO practices to higher rankings. Well, the short answer is that some people want quick results. But in general, it really isn’t worth it.
Black hat SEO is an unethical way of doing SEO as you could see from the points made. And besides, to all of these black hat techniques there are alternatives of a white hat SEO techniques which you can knock yourself off with. What white hat SEO technique would you prefer? Be sure to let me know.
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