What is Black-Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is the SEO practice that violates search engine policies with the aim of ranking a website.
Generally speaking, Black hat SEO is a manipulative tactic to dramatically increase a website’s ranking by falsely giving signals to search engines and crawlers.
While Black hat SEO is still very relevant and a common practise for some… Google has made great headway in the fight against black hat SEO and spam tactics in 2024, especially with the recent spam algorithm updates.
It’s important to know that black hat SEO, while it may sound great to get some “quick wins”, comes with substantial risk and the chance of receiving manual actions against your website.
Here’s an example of a website that has been hit with manual actions for black hat tactics…
This graph displayed the dramatic decline in both traffic and rankings to the point that the website in 2022 generated over 140k traffic, and now, being black listed and generating 0.
Is Black Hat SEO important?
Black hat SEO isn’t the best practice, and it is risky.
Many black hat strategies may work in the short term, but they will often be addressed within an algorithm update and run the risk of losing rankings as fast as you may gain them.
White hat SEO is the opposite… reliable, consistent & accumulative SEO that will align with search engines, which, while it may require a little more patience… often wins in the long term.
If your serious about your business, and understand the opportunities that a strong SEO campaign will provide a business, then ensure to implement white hat SEO.
Common Black Hat SEO tactics
Whether you are looking to implement or trying to avoid, it’s important to understand the black hat tactics that are commonly used.
1. Buying backlinks
Purchasing backlinks from one website to another is considered a black hat tactic. As links are still a strong metric that is measured by Google, the process of buying a large number of links is to falsify a website’s authority and credibility.
2. Using PBNs
PBNs or Private blog networks are groups of websites (within a single network) that are developed with the sole goal of linking out to other websites. These are often cheap and are designed to artificially boost the receiving websites’ domain authority.
3. Creating automated content
With AI in abundance Google has put forward some guidelines to where they stand on AI content and automated content in SEO.
Google isn’t against AI, and AI content isn’t considered black hat SEO… as long as it provides value and the quality of the content is high!
However, in Googles spam policies, they do outline “spammy automatically generated content” as it being against Googles spam guidelines.
This includes content that is:
- Automatically translated without human interaction
- Content spinning or article spinning
- Keyword stuffing
- Content with the sole purpose of ranking & thin content… etc.
4. Negative SEO
This is the tactic to sabotage a competitor’s website and its ranking in SERPs.
- This often includes tactics such as;
- Spammy irrelevant links to their website
- Content duplication (Trying to demonstrate plagiarism)
- Or Content distribution on the site (database injections etc.)
Major search engines work on their algorithms to detect such actions and give little attention to these, reducing the risk of being affected by negative SEO for the receiving website.
