Black Hat SEO

72.8k

Black hat SEO refers to those marketers who manipulate best practice techniques to essentially ‘cheat’ the system.

Black Hat

SEO refers to those marketers who manipulate best practice techniques to essentially ‘cheat’ the system.

Black hat

techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks.

Black Hat SEO

refers to those marketers who manipulate best practice techniques to essentially ‘cheat’ the system.

Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks. If you fast forward to today, I don’t leverage or practice black hat or negative SEO techniques when it comes to internet marketing and if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have dabbled in the art of the dark side.

Black hat SEO

refers to those marketers who manipulate best practice techniques to essentially ‘cheat’ the system. Marketers found to be using black hat SEO methods can be issued Google penalties, be wiped from search engines or see metrics completely drop.

Read about 17 of them that can hurt your optimization efforts.

What is a black hat SEO technique?

The last thing you want is to produce an article that reads unnaturally or like spam this is a common reason Google hands out PageRank penalties. They used to be much more prevalent in the 90s and early 2000s, particularly amongst fan pages for different tv shows, movies, musicians, etc. A common example of this black hat SEO technique is submitting a text-only version of a web page to the search engines for indexing. Pulling a bait-and-switch with your readers is called “content cloaking, and it can land your domain a severe penalty.

What is an example of black hat SEO?

As such, they’ve created SEO guidelines to ensure that every website “plays fair –– if you’re not playing fair, it’s considered Black Hat SEO. This should have never been the case, and SEOs should have always focused their efforts on creating that best result on the web, not just making it seem as though it is. The rule of thumb is that the content is okay so long as the content is visible to both the user and the search engine. You can do keyword research to find out what people are searching for but overusing these keywords in your content is not a good idea.

Does black hat SEO Still Work?

As long as you’re writing content, building links and spreading your brand’s influence with your users’ experience in mind, you’ll be in a great position to continue reaping the rewards of your SEO strategy. It's common sense to many marketers that you should be writing content that works for your users and that you shouldn't be hiding text, but link building gets a little more complex. If no value is added to the user, but rankings are likely to increase, then your decisions are highly likely to be black hat. Using black hat SEO tactics can lead to your website being penalized (either algorithmically or with a manual action), which means lower-ranking positions and, most likely, a decline in organic traffic.