Black Hat SEO

Submitted by Александр Зинченко on 4, May 2022
Black Hat SEO

A back-handed approach to SEO that involves shortcuts and manipulation of a website. It is prohibited by the search engines.

Search engines, such as Google to Bing or Yandex, make it very clear which types of practices go against their terms. They're also quite clear on the potential outcomes if you violate their guidelines. 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.

Black Hat SEO methods and techniques

Content

  1. Cloaking
  2. Using duplicate content for negative SEO
  3. Stealing valuable content
  4. Keywords stuffing
  5. Automatically generate meaningless content

Technical parameters

  1. Misleading redirections
  2. Keyword domain names (EMD).
  3. Satellite pages
  4. Hacking a site to improve its SEO
  5. Hotlinking, stealing images to boost its SEO
  6. Cybersquatting and typosquatting

Links

  1. Automated link generation services
  2. Integrating links without coherence / not contextualized in articles
  3. Spamming comments and link forums
  4. Making "toxic" backlinks to your competitor.
  5. Excessive link exchange

The Risks of Black Hat SEO

  1. It can lead to lower search rankings or even cause a site to disappear from search results entirely. Because black hat SEO techniques go explicitly against search engine terms of service, search engines may penalize and even ban sites from appearing on their search results pages if they engage in these tactics.
  2. It only creates short-term results (if any). Because black hat strategies exploit loopholes in search guidelines, the results earned through the tactics will disappear once the loophole is fixed. This happens continuously, as search engines are always looking for and fixing loopholes that people use to game the system.
  3. It creates a poor, annoying, or misleading experience for audiences. Many black hat tactics create a poor user experience, which can cause users to leave a page. It can also make a brand look spammy and untrustworthy.

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