What is Black Hat SEO?

SEO involves implementing a digital strategy in order to improve the customer’s experience and your website’s ranking in Google’s SERPs (for more information about SEO best practises, check out my previous post). Black Hat SEO is different from traditional SEO techniques, as ignores the customer experience and focuses on manipulating Google’s bots, tricking them in to ranking your website higher by doing dishonest things that violate Google’s terms of service. This article discusses different Black Hat SEO techniques, their effect, and what happens when you get caught lying to Google.

 

What different techniques do people use?

 

Keyword Stuffing

Using poor quality content that heavily targets keywords but doesn’t flow naturally tends to be frowned upon nowadays. You used to be able to trick Google’s bots with this trick, but nowadays it just makes it confusing for customers to read.

 

Irrelevant Keywords

Have you ever searched a hashtag on Instagram or Twitter, for example #cat, and found something completely unrelated like a picture of a pen? Were you really annoyed that someone was wasting your time trying to get you to look at something completely different to what you wanted? That’s how Google feels when you try and target rankings for keywords completely irrelevant to your business and product.

 

Invisible Text

Some people still use this old trick of blending keyword-rich text in to the background by making the text the same colour, meaning people visiting the page won’t see it. Alternatively, text can be positioned off the page using CSS.

 

Buying Links

In my last post, I discussed how legitimate and meaningful link-building is in the top two most important things you can do to increase your Google rank. However, for a small fee you can buy web domains that will point towards your site, making Google think your site is good. ‘I knew a guy who would offer 100,000 links for £5,000. But it was never worth it. The links I saw were from Eastern European adult sites. Terrible,’ I was told by the Director of a Brighton digital marketing & SEO firm.

Although this strategy may work in the short-term, Google will associate those irrelevant websites with yours, they will quickly clock-on to your game and may issue an appropriate punishment.

 

Spam Posts

Have you seen those annoying fake comments (Buzzfeed used to be full of them) saying ‘I work from home and earn $10,000 a month. Click here to see how: gibberishlink.com’? They’re made using special software that generates lots of links; the rationale behind it being that having lots of links on different websites pointing towards your own is good for ranking. This tactic is a complete waste of time as the links gained this way have the ‘nofollow’ attribute, meaning they don’t create any SEO/link juice (a term used to describe the link-building that helps and contributes towards the overall reputation and ranking of the site).

 

Punishment

When you get caught out, Google may issue you a penalty (which you might not even know about), or in extreme cases, you may be removed from Google’s search results altogether.

 

Why Do People Bother?

Black Hat SEO may work in the short term, giving websites a burst before they get punished. If you’re actually trying to build a long-lasting business, these tactics are best avoided. With 2017 set to have more internet traffic than all prior internet years combined, can you afford not to be listed on the most popular website in the world, with almost 3 billion searches made on it every day? (statistics via Hosting Facts)