What is Black Hat SEO Technique?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential to stamp your presence in the online world. There are various techniques involved in SEO which are classified as White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO.

When SEO first become recognized as a rightful form of marketing, there was no difference between White Hat (Ethical) and Black Hat (Unethical) techniques.

In early SEO, most search engine optimization techniques were Black Hat. Users were becoming fed up with finding pages that were not relevant to their searches.

Search engines became useless and obsolete. They developed algorithms to detect and penalize cheaters. White Hat SEO gets the appreciation from search engines while Black Hat SEO is dumped as an unethical practice.

Black Hat SEO is a disapproved practice and against search engine guidelines. It can also result in the website being banned from the search engines. These techniques don’t comply with the accepted guidelines or code of conduct set by major search engines.

Black hat SEO techniques can manipulate by using different methods to cheat the accepted guidelines to boost a website’s ranking quickly.

Why Black Hat SEO is Not Approved –

Black hat SEO involves techniques that help in acquiring quick results for website owner only. These techniques are not abided by the rules and regulations of search engines.

Users are not benefited as the tactics are aimed at drawing a crowd but not interested in providing the solution to the end user.

Search engines initially crawl to these websites but it doesn’t take long after realizing that these websites have not the quality for the users and can ban such websites.

These unethical tactics don’t solve for the searcher and end-up in a penalty from search engines. Black Hat SEO techniques may include keyword stuffing, cloaking, link farming, and using hidden text.

The Most Common Black Hat SEO Techniques –

Here are some of the most common black hat SEO techniques which are practiced by SEO practitioners hoping to achieve quicker results. But the results are temporary.

# Hidden Text – It refers to the text and links of a page’s content that is invisible to the user while visible to the search engines. SEO practitioners use the text which is visible to the search engine spiders but not to people visiting your website.

Some optimizers want the search engines to find keyword rich content which was hiding from the visitors. SEO practitioners hide the links or text to increase keyword density on a page or to improve the internal link structure.

It can be achieved in different ways like matching the text color to the background, use super-tiny font sizes or posting an image over the text.

In Black Hat SEO, hidden links can be using hyperlinks in single letter or characters which include header and footer links which are useless.

Images can be used to supply additional content to search engines. The tiny or pointless logically named graphics with well-optimized ALT Attributes are inserted to the search engines.

# Doorway Pages – A doorway page is basically a page which is created for the sole sake of high ranking with the search engines. This Black Hat SEO technique leads to the deployment of duplicate contents.

It produces a website across different domains in hopes of either increasing cross-linking or attaining higher ranking on a more search engine friendly URL.

Doorway pages are nothing but fake pages that spam the search engines’ index to attract visitors. These are groups of poorly written pages optimized for specific keywords or keyphrases.

These pages usually have little content in favor of call-to-action and links that drive users through multiple webpages to a single landing page.

The user doesn’t get to see the page through which he is supposed to have entered the website. Doorway pages are multiple landing pages whereas each page is optimized for specific sets of keyphrases.

This black hat approach is applied if a service is offered in different communities or countries which require new landing pages for specific markets.

Doorway pages can either be lost files or are often listed in the landing page footer links. There are little variations in the actual content but their intent is for cheating.

Doorway pages are created to trick the search engines and try to be ranked higher. Some practitioners use doorway pages to redirect user traffic to websites without their knowledge.

Doorway pages are on the radar of the major search engines and will take punitive actions against websites that employ them. These pages can be used to easily navigate by redirecting traffic internally or externally.

# Article Spinning and Duplicate Content – It’s the practice with which you’ll have less chance of being penalized by Google, but it’s also not recommended.

The concept is to find articles targeting the same topics you want to write on and write them just enough so search engines won’t notice. Article spinning is used as an Off-page black hat SEO technique for backlinking purposes.

It consists of creating new articles based on original ones. This practice is based on the idea of reusing texts by changing words or the order of sentences.

SEO practitioners create multiple versions of text-based content and embed backlinks to their websites. They submit each version of spun articles to their different websites for publication.

This black hat SEO technique is very funny as it’s clearly created for the search engine, not for the end-user. Article spinning seems intelligent and unique but it’s nothing more than a weak search engine optimizer’s plagiarisms.

It’s a lazy attempt to promote a website with the use of content from other sources. Some spin articles give the stolen content a different treatment to use the same for own website.

Duplication and spinning articles are unethical and the quality of the article goes down after spinning. Duplicate content is plagiarizing another’s work instead of doing it yourself.

Duplicate content can refer to on-site article spinning. It refers to the establishment of affiliate programs for website promotion.

Practitioners will offer a set of template webpages designed to drive traffic to their website to a group of affiliates. These templates websites offer minimal original content, serve no purpose other than SEO.

The other example of duplicate content is commonly known as plagiarism. It’s lifting content from another published website to as one’s own.

It can also refer to paraphrasing said content without attribution in a manner that is still clearly someone else’s work.

# Cloaking – It’s a trap technique since what the search engine sees is not the same the users see. It becomes a black hat SEO technique whenever a website offers content to search engine different than delivered to the visitors.

Cloaking involves showing one piece of content to users and a different piece of content for search engines. SEO practitioners code their webpages and websites in such a way that crawlers see one version, and users see another.

The keywords in titles and content designed for the crawlers are completely different from the original content given to the user. Spam websites generally try and avoid search engine bot to finding out their spammed content.

It involves complex coding which enables you to show one page to Google and an entirely different page to your visitors.

These types of cheats are determined by server-side scripting and can be difficult for the search engine to detect. Cloaking is done by server-side scripts which identify the IP address to accessing the page.

Generally, those users identified as web crawlers are served keyword and Meta Tag stuffed content while all others are served human-friendly content.

Tailoring your content to different groups of users is acceptable as long as you’re not changing the content that appears for search engines crawlers.

A Redirect involves sending the user to a different URL than they clicked. It includes redirecting a search engine crawler to one page and all other users to another page.

Redirects should only be used for the designed purpose only. It’s also acceptable to use JavaScript to redirect users on some occasions. Misleading redirects have only intention to increase their search engine ranking.

These websites may or may not have relevant content. These tricky redirects violate the guidelines of search engines like Google. Spam websites are easily detected and face the prospects of a ban or a severe effect on search rankings.

# Link Farming – Link farming is a black hat SEO technique whenever links are acquired unnaturally and not based on the web page’s own merit. Link farming refers to a website or a set of websites specifically designed to get backlinks to your main website.

These websites backlinks to the main website have low-level content. They carry a lot of links and can provide a good deal of backlinks.

Link building/farming strategies like swapping links, useless article submission, blog comment spamming, and forum signature is spammed.

However, if someone is selling links then you’re not only their clients. They’ll sell links to as many as possible and search engine marks them as spam.

You’ll waste money on links not helping your website rise in the SERPs. But you might get penalized for them.

# Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing essentially consists of repeatedly using a single word. It’s an unethical, simple and very popular practice. It’s the excessive use of keywords for which the website owner wants to rank their website in the SERPs.

Sometimes it’s combined with invisible or hidden text to load the website with the keywords without appearing in the content too many times.

The most common practice involved while writing content and it refers to the practice of using keywords largely to improve the page ranking of a website.

It’s a part of the SEO system whereas words are stuffed into sentences and paragraph as unnoticeable as possible to impress the search engine.

It’s a practice of filing your content with the irrelevant keyword in an attempt to manipulate where the page rank. Irrelevant keywords are used to the website at a time and they are hidden using various methods.

Keyword stuffing does no good to the readers. Adding multiple variations of keywords where they add no value creates a bad user experience.

Keyword stuffing could be as:-

• Any list of phone numbers without significant value addition
• A block of text listing cities and states on a webpage
• Stuffing or spamming the single words or phrases

You should concentrate on creating useful content that focuses on topics over keywords rather than filling your content with irrelevant keywords.

The logic behind keyword stuffing is that search engines much rely on keywords and metadata to make sense of your content.

# Markup Schema Spam – It’s a type of code you can add to your pages so that search engines can understand the content better. You can completely renovate your Meta descriptions and transform them into rich snippets.

Rich snippets feature is a higher click-through-rate (CTR) than normal links. The more information you give to search engines, the more likely the algorithm displays your pages.

Using keywords within a markup schema makes sense. You should never try to spam keywords within markup schema or Meta description.  

White Hat SEO vs Black Hat SEO –

Black and White have SEO techniques are night and day. Techniques and practices of both Black hat SEO and White hat SEO tend to have several elements in common.

White hat SEO focuses on good techniques like website optimization, original, quality content, and link building for the betterment of SEO and users.

These methods are tried and tested that match a search engine’s ranking algorithm. White Hat SEO websites have the opportunity to gradually build themselves from the ground.

These techniques don’t present website owners with immediate results. The growth period is relatively slow and takes time to create effectively.

While black hat SEO focuses on scheming search engines and competitors to obtain better rankings and page visibility than deserved.

The differences occur in how these elements get used. Some of the elements make use of comparing the differences are as:-

# Meta Tags – Black Hat SEO use keyword stuffing or spamming using too many keywords to be picked up quickly and easily by search engines.

White Hat SEO use keywords and phrases that are researched and accurately represents a website and its content. These keywords also accurately match a target audience current searching.

# Content – Black Hat SEO uses hidden content whereas text contains hidden keywords against a background of the same color. Comment tags can also be used to hide keywords.

White Hat SEO does research on quality content where keywords are strongly relevant and consistently used throughout a page.

# Links – Black Hat SEO technique use link farming where links are exchanged with many other websites.

White Hat SEO technique uses inbound links where links are not traded with other websites. Inbound links can be created when other links to a website’s content providing additional and relevant information.

# Page Elements – Black Hat SEO technique use doorway passages also known as bridge pages, jump pages, and portal pages. Keyword phrases are used to create an increase in website traffic levels. Doorway passages spam search engines with these specific keyword phrases.

White Hat SEO put headings to make use of SEO friendly keywords and phrases.      

Conclusion – Any website’s organic traffic growth takes time. Black Hat SEO techniques produce quicker results but they never last. These methods are appealing for the very reason that they do actually work. Methods need to be constantly updated so as to try and avoid getting caught out. In addition, Google is upgrading and improving its ranking algorithm every day, and this allows it to identify and penalize websites using black hat SEO techniques.