What is Black Hat SEO?

What is Black Hat SEO? Black Hat SEO is the use of aggressive SEO techniques that focus not on a human audience but on search engines alone. This method doesn’t typically abide by the SEO guidelines. Black Hat SEO can range anywhere from invisible text, keyword stuffing and unrelated keywords all the way to fully changing the website after being ranked by the search engines, better known as page swapping. This method is used by those who are looking to make a quick financial return, and those not looking to make a long-term investment in their site. This form of SEO not only is against Google’s rules and guidelines, but its use in intended to corrupt your competitors. Normally, taking away from your rivals is great for business as it gains you a new piece of the market. However, when done this way, you are subjected to many Google penalties, which will make you worse off than before you decided to bend the rules.

Reasons To Stay Away From Black Hat SEO

• Black Hat SEO is more expensive than ever – Google is much smarter than we are. They have the smartest minds working for them 24/7. So, their methods are always evolving. Also, all those tricks you would use before, low-cost spamming and keyword stuffing, are no longer effective. Therefore, any other tactics you would have to use have become increasingly expensive.
• Black Hat SEO is very risky – Nobody wants to be penalized by Google. However, if you choose the Black Hat SEO route, there is a high chance you will receive one. Therefore, it seems obvious to avoid doing it. Being penalized by Google has more repercussions than you will understand.
• Black Hat SEO requires some level of “technology knowledge” – Using the Black Hat SEO route will only get you so far unless you have a profound and detailed understanding of how the web works. Also, how to exploit that knowledge in your favor. Most of this knowledge is not publicly known, which means most people won’t be able to do it properly.

5 Risky Black Hate SEO Strategies Used

In the world of SEO, there are clear policies to follow. Rules are rules and they are established to keep a level playing field and to provide a safe environment  to ensure the quality of the user experience. Ranking high requires keeping up with the current trends which follow these rules and guidelines. Yet, we still seem to find users who want to cut corners and break the rules. The will be penalized, but they are still a nuisance along the way.

Just in case you were curious what trends to avoid, here is a list of five which are very commonly used, and very commonly penalized:

• Paid Links – Buying links is way to easy. Once the transaction is done, there is no need to bother with the quality of the content. Also, the anchor text is a strong Google ranking factor, is also chosen to the customers preference. This is a serious Black Hat tactic.
• Spam Comments – Intended to create free backlinks, this method gains you 100% no follow and no transfer of link juice. Which does make this technique a real waste of time. However, it is still extremely popular. There are even tools which will sprinkle comments throughout the Internet
• Duplicate Content – Copy and Pasting someones work across many domains will destroy the value that the content delivers to your competitor. For example, if you knew that one of their blogs is bringing in 90% of their traffic, then posting that blog everywhere will destroy their rankings, if they aren’t prepared.
• Article Spinning – Similar to duplicate content, and is getting more and more popular with every update to Google’s rules, this is the next level of plagiarism. This involves taking great content, from an already established source, and changes a few of the phrases to modify it in a way to become its own content. This method significantly cuts down the chances of being detected by the plagiarism tool.
• Cloaking – This method is considered to be a deceptive trick due to the way it gets around the rules and regulations to gain their desired rankings. This is a direct violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines because it serves people with irrelevant results.