Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is a type of SEO. It is the practice against Google’s guidelines to boost the ranking of a website. These black hat SEO techniques are not good for the user’s experience. These are not useful to solve problems. Instead, a website gets penalized which is doing this practice. Google or other search engines do not like this practice but still, some people use it to get ranked on search engines instantly. The black hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, paid links, and cloaking.
For your business or website growth, it is important to get appeared in search engine results. There are two ways to do this. One is white hat SEO which is the right way and the other is black hat SEO which is wrong. Black hat SEO plays with search engine algorithms instead of providing solutions to customers’ problems. Black hat SEO uses different tactics to rank on SERP.
The continuous use of black hat SEO techniques will damage the presence of your site and ultimately down the ranking. Google aims to provide the best results to its users. They desired to provide the best search experience to users without providing spammy results.
Google has a strong algorithm to do that automatically and do manual actions to penalize those sites which are using black hat SEO techniques. Google has made its algorithm more complex with the passage of time. Therefore, everyone should avoid black hat SEO practices. Today or tomorrow you will be caught by search engines and get a penalty.
In contrast to black hat SEO, white hat SEO techniques focus on providing quality content and the best user experience.
Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is the practice against search engine guidelines and doing chicanes with algorithms to get a higher ranking. It is harmful to the website and leads to hiding completely or lowering the positions. On the other hand, white hat SEO is a legal and ethical way to do SEO. In white hat SEO, webmasters focus on developing original and engaging content for the users and getting backlinks from other websites in a legal way.
Black Hat SEO Techniques
There are many black hat SEO techniques underused but we will discuss some of them here.
Keyword Stuffing
This technique refers to adding irrelevant keywords to the content to get a rank on the search engine result page (SERP). This is a bad exercise because this type of content will not be liked by the users. It will impact your site badly.
When you use a lot of irrelevant keywords, your page may rank for an irrelevant query. Google says that does not use a list of phone numbers without substantial added value. Also, avoid the repetition of the same keyword or phrase because it looks unnatural.
When you use keywords, again and again, Google will catch it and it sounds unnatural. Expert says that use 2-3 times keyword in 1000 word article. It is enough. Let’s have an example of keyword stuffing.
“Handmade bags” are very popular among people. Most people prefer to buy handmade bags. Handmade bags are made up of high quality and handmade bags maker do not compromise on the quality of handmade bag”.
In the above example, you can see that the keyword “handmade bags” has been used five times in a single paragraph. It looks unnatural and somewhat boring because the same word is repeated again and again.
Do keyword research to find what people are searching but do not use these words repeatedly. It is not a good practice. Concentrate on 1 or 2 keywords and design your content around that instead of using irrelevant keywords.
Cloaking
Cloaking is another black hat SEO technique in which a website shows one piece of content to search engines and the other piece of content to the user. The purpose of this back hat SEO technique is to rank a web page for various terms that are irrelevant. Spammy websites do this practice.
Providing content in different groups is acceptable. You can shrink the size for mobile users. A page’s language can also be changed according to country. These practices are acceptable. There is no specific rule for acceptance or rejection.
Paid links
Another black hat SEO technique is paid guest posting. In paid guest posting newly made websites buy do-follow backlinks from high authority websites. Google and other search engines do not like this practice but still many websites do that.
Actually, among other ranking factors of Google, backlink count from high authority is also a ranking factor. So, websites buy backlinks to get rank search engines. According to Google guidelines, if a link is paid then it should be marked as sponsored.
Poor quality content
Poor quality content is also a part of black hat SEO that has no value for researchers. At one-time search engines’ algorithms were not so good but now if someone uses duplicated content or copies from another website, it will be caught instantly.
Google allows only 20% plagiarism (copied content). The 80% content should be unique. So people use hidden keywords that are invisible to users. They make the same color of keyword heading as the color of the page. This is also a black hat SEO technique.
Blog Comment spam
As the name suggests, in this black hat SEO technique blog comments are used to promote blog website. Nowadays this technique is not useful as Google has upgraded its algorithm and does not count links in blogs comments to rank any website.
These types of links are considered no-follow links and do not pass the authority. Many people on Fiverr and other same sites are still offering blog commenting but we recommend avoiding this practice because it is a spammy way.