When it comes to SEO, it’s wise to avoid black hat tactics.
What is black hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is an umbrella term for all practices that can improve your performance in the organic search results in ways that search engines like Google condemn.
Engaging in black hat SEO schemes can get your site punished on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and, in some cases, banned from search engines completely. So, it’s best to stay with Google’s policies as much as possible.
A rule of thumb you can follow to determine if a tactic falls under the black hat SEO practice is to ask yourself: “Am I doing this to offer value to my site visitors, or am I doing this ONLY to do better in the search results?” If the answer is the latter one, it’s safe to stay away from or think twice whatever method you’re considering.
A brief history of black hat SEO
Long ago, in the early 2000s, to be successful on all the major search engines we now take for granted was fooling around in terms of -
- Stuff keywords
- Build a network of sites that existed for the sole purpose of linking to each other and pushing themselves up the rankings
- Cloaking your content so it shows one thing to search engines and something completely different to users
But, once the search engines are getting smarter, especially when Google has become the leader, it started cracking down on spamdexing. Update after update of the search algorithm sought to improve crawling and indexing by penalizing over-optimizers, keyword stuffers, and spam link builders.
Google over the past decade or so, messaged clearly to the worldwide SEO community: webmasters and content creators are to prioritize user experience (UX) over search engine optimization. Relevant, high-quality information from fast-loading, easily browsing websites became (and remains) the number one priority.
Which tactics are considered black hat SEO?
Now, let’s talk about some risky black hat SEO techniques.
- Gateway (doorway) pages: web pages aimed to rank highly for particular search queries and that exist solely to direct visitors to another page on the same site.
- Content automation: using a tool or program to automatically generate and publish content.
- Hidden text and links: making certain text or links invisible to visitors with the intent of augmenting purely for search engines.
- Keyword stuffing: excessively adjusting a piece of content for a given keyword by overusing it in the content body and headings, image names and ALT, Meta tags, and so on.
- Link farming: forming a network of sites for no reason other than to link to each other and get higher rankings.
- Buying links: paying other websites to link to yours in order to manage Domain Authority.
- Cloaking: presenting one piece of content to search engine bots and another piece of content to visitors.
- Spam comments: building links to your site in the comment sections of other websites in order to achieve Domain Authority.
- Footer spam: packing footers with links for the only purpose of ranking.
- Article spinning: using software to mechanically regenerate existing content in a rephrased way.
- Using irrelevant keywords: including irrelevant keywords into an old piece of content for the only purpose of ranking for those keywords.
- Click baiting: building links to a high-quality piece of content, only to replace that content with something more profit-making or money-making.
- Scraping: stealing another site’s content and using it to drive traffic to your site.
- Low-quality guest posting: writing a guest post on another site only for the sake of linking to your own.
- Tradeoff products for links: offer free product in exchange for receiving reviews of it and linking to your site.
- Negative SEO: do a negative SEO campaign for a competitor website in hopes that their fall will boost your rankings.
- False headlines: baiting clicks with an enticing yet false headline and directing visitors to an unrelated page or piece of content.
This list is not at all exhaustive - there are many other tactics that can get you a penalty. Since; organic search is in constant flux, so this list may also evolve in the future. But, for the time being, these 17s should give you a pretty good idea of what are black hat techniques.
What is the difference between white hat and black hat SEO?
White hat SEO refers to - the set of Google-recommended webmaster guidelines that will improve your organic search rankings.
Undoubtedly, the best thing you can do to rank higher is created informative, high-quality, easy-to-understand content that answers visitors’ questions and solves their problems. This requires a strong understanding of search intent and a willingness to do robust keyword research. You can’t develop useful content unless you know what your visitors are seeking and how you want to present it so they find it helpful.
Generally, good content earns links from reputed sites. Although there’s nothing wrong with guest blogging and outreach (I encourage these things in fact), getting an authoritative inbound link without asking for it is always desirable.
On top of that, your website needs to be fast, secure, and easy to browse.
As of now, Google is officially penalizing sites that take too long to load, particularly on mobile devices. Not to mention the fact that users with 4G and 5G networks simply aren’t going to tolerate slowness.
Making the switch from HTTP to HTTPS is a no-brainer considering the importance of keeping web security intact to its fullest, and as it’s been a ranking factor for nearly half a decade.
Ease of use is significant for a couple reasons. One: making it easy for users to navigate around and find what they need to find is a surefire way to decrease bounce rate. Two: making it easy for crawlers to consume content ensures that more of your pages will be indexed properly and featured on the SERPs. Keep your internal links organized and make sure it takes no more than two clicks to get to important sections of the site.
On-page SEO is all about making your page as contextually relevant to the search query as possible.
For a given page, the title tag is the hyperlinked text that search engine users are typically going to see on the SERP.
Including your primary keyword in the title tag makes the page more relevant to the search query and increases the likelihood that searchers will click through. Make sure the title’s length is optimized enough to avoid truncation and to keep users engaged by presenting it logically.
The Meta description is the snippet of text that appears below the title tag on the SERP.
It’s your opportunity to 1) further demonstrate the relevance of the page by including the semantic variations of the primary keyword and 2) tell the users what the page’s content is about. Keeping the Meta description succinct ensures that it will appear meaningfully on both mobile devices and desktops.
Make sure to include your targeted keyword and its close variants thoughtfully throughout the page, too: in your heading tags (H1, H2, etc.), throughout the body copy, and in the URL. This shows visitors (and search engines too) that the content is tightly relevant and that they should remain engaged. Further, using the keyword in your image names and in the images’ ALT texts will give web spiders an even better indication of what the page is about.
The middle hat: Grey hat SEO
Certainly, the heading of this section is slightly ambiguous.
It’s not entirely incorrect to think of grey hat SEO as the "no man's land" between black hat and white hat SEO practices. However, it’s more precise to consider it as a practice that is neither straightforward black hat nor white hat.
Google hasn’t passed the verdict on all credible SEO tactics till now. Though Google has shared its stance on some things so far. So, if it’s unclear whether Google’s evolving search algorithm has issues with a particular practice - and if SEOs can have arguments both for and against the issue - then it’s likely that you have a grey hat situation on your hands.
Why is it essential to be aware that a new idea of yours is the grey hat? Because experimenting with any untested idea is basically to take a risk with the hope of gaining something positive from it. This is absolutely true especially in the field of SEO where a lot of principles are yet to be well-defined. Sure, it could boost your ranking and help grow your business. Or, it could go all wrong. All you can do is educate yourself as much as possible and do some cost-benefit analysis.
Is the prospect of a new idea worth the risk of lost conversion?
Final thoughts
SEOs will debate about best and worst practices forever. What we know is, we don’t know which factors are behind Google’s algorithm or how these factors are weighted. Plus, the rules are changing many times in a single year. This all sums up to a lot of room for speculation and disagreement.
What’s not unclear is that doing shady stuff gets you in the danger. When your organic traffic volume stagnant or drops, it is tempting to become reckless. That’s pretty much common as it is impacting ROI. But forget not that, there’s always something (or a bunch of things) that can be tweaked, improved, repaired, or removed. It’s just a matter of staying on top of it - means that you are fully in control of the situation and can react rationally if something changes.
