Black hat SEO is type of SEO. It is the practice against Google’s guidelines to boost ranking of website. These black hat SEO techniques are not good for user’s experience. These are not useful to solve problem. Instead a website get 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 engine 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 right way and the other is black hat SEO which is wrong. Black hat SEO plays with search engine’s algorithm instead of providing the solutions to customer’s problems. Black hat SEO uses different tactics to rank on SERP.
The continuous use black hat SEO techniques will damage the presence of your site and ultimately down the ranking. Google aims to provide the best results to his users. They desired to provide the best search experience to users without providing spammy results.
Google have a strong algorithm to do that automatically and do manual actions to penalize those sites which are using black hat SEO techniques. Google have 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 penalty.
In contrast to black hat SEO, white hat SEO techniques focuses on providing quality content and best user experience.
Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO
Black hat SEO is the practice against search engine guidelines and do chicanes with algorithm to get higher ranking. It is harmful for website and leads to hide completely or lower 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 get backlinks from other websites in a legal way.
Black Hat SEO Techniques
There are many black hat SEO techniques under use but we will discuss some of them here.
Keyword Stuffing
This technique refers to adding irrelevant keywords in content to get rank on 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 irrelevant query. Google says that do not use a list of phone numbers without substantial added value. Also avoid the repetition of same keyword or phrase because it looks unnatural. When you use keyword 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 of the people prefer to buy handmade bags. Handmade bags are made up of high quality and handmade bags maker do not compromise on 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 repeating again and again. Do keywords 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 website show one piece of content to search engines and the other piece of content to user. The purpose of this back hat SEO technique is to rank 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 user. A page language can also be change according to country. These practices are acceptable. There is no specific rule for the acceptance of 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’ algorithm were not so good but now if someone use duplicate content or copy from other 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 user. They make the same color of keyword heading as the color of page. This is also black hat SEO technique.
Blog Comment spam
As the name suggest, in this black hat SEO technique blog comments are used to link your website. Now days this technique is not useful as Google have upgraded its algorithm and do not count links in blogs comments to rank any website. These type of links are considered as 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 to avoid this practice because it is a spammy way.