Digital Marketing

What Is Black Hat SEO?

6 years ago

Search engine optimization or SEO is the best way to increase the rank of your website or web page. You can find many companies online, but you have to make sure the company is a white hat one like https://www.webenertia.com/.

However, in the event that you are unable to avail of the services of the above-mentioned SEO firm, you can surely consider contacting SEO agencies like Victorious, which is known to be a values-driven SEO agency. Moreover, they are known to have been voted the SEO Agency of the Year by Search Engine Land. Most importantly, they are known to be trusted by brands like Yahoo for first page results. That said, you can hop over to these guys to learn more about them if you are interested.

Anyway, while you are choosing an agency, ensure that they are a white-hat SEO firm. Remember that there are two basic ways to perform SEO – the black hat method and the white hat method. In this article, I’ll be discussing the description and common practices of the black hat method.

So, What Is The Black Hat Method?

If you’ve played some online role-playing video games in the past, you’re familiar with a black mage character. Black magic refers to the dark arts of destruction. This is where the term “black hat” is conceived.

Black hat SEO refers to a set of unethical tactics to achieve a higher ranking in the search engine results. Like the bad guy it truly is, it defies the search engines guidelines. It can harm some websites and even your own sometimes.

This particular SEO method is used to be legit but it gained a lot of displeasure when some people began to abuse it. Now, your website can be expelled from the search engines if you get caught doing these evil practices. This will hurt your brand and tarnish your reputation.

What Are The Common Practices Of Black Hat SEO?

The following tactics are known to be black hat and shouldn’t be performed if you want to stay in the search engine results:

  • Keyword Stuffing: This is the art of putting too many keywords into your website even when it’s no longer making sense at all. Although it can temporarily increase your ranking, it significantly lowers the quality and user-friendliness of your site.
  • Doorway Pages: These are web pages made to let the search engine spiders crawl the links and keywords for the main website. Actually, you won’t see these pages because they’re merely created as a dummy.
  • Hidden Texts: This SEO tactic literally uses invisible texts to stuff your website with some keywords. The color of the text is similar to the background making it invisible to readers.
  • Negative SEO: This is the evil practice of attempting to ruin the rankings of your competitors in the search engine results. For instance, buying a massive amount of spammy links to damage their link profile.

There are still a lot of black hat SEO tactics that SEO practitioners often use. Examples are content automation, sneaky redirects, cloaking, article spinning, and link schemes. You could also consider contacting a consultancy that provides SEO auditing for your business and offers some helpful advice on how to improve the current state of your company’s SEO.

Alternatively, if your website is attacked with a negative SEO campaign, you may report it through Google Webmaster Tools. Ask for a malware review in case your site is attacked with a virus or malware.

Should You Do Black Hat SEO?

If you want to build a good brand or reputation, then black hat SEO is a big no-no. It can only get your website banned from Google and other search engines if you get caught. Instead of using these unethical SEO practices, look for alternate ways. For example, focus on the quality of your content rather than on keywords.

However, you can use these practices if you’re looking to get a quick financial return on your website. Being banned is somewhat an insignificant risk if you focus on quick high returns.

Related articles