In the world of SEO, we have clear policies to follow. Rules are established to provide a useful, relevant and safe environment and to ensure the quality of user experience. Ranking high requires keeping up with the current and changing SEO trends and constantly adjusting your approach to suit any new algorithm updates.
On the other side, there are the people (spammers) who try to outsmart search engines and bring organic traffic to their websites without following any rules, but breaking them instead. That’s the dark side of SEO.
If you are curious, what the most common black hat SEO practices used to manipulate Google today are just keep on reading, I am going to reveal them within this article!
#1 Paid Links
Matt Cutts explains it clearly:
The vast majority of the time things are incredibly clear: people are paying money outright for links based on PageRank, flowing the PageRank, trying to get high the rankings.
He also adds that:
Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s abundantly clear that these are links that are being bought and paid and sold and all that sort of stuff.
In this video, Matt explains 4 ways Google evaluates paid links:
Buying links for SEO has some undeniable advantages for the buyer. First of all, it is easy. Once a transaction is done, there is no need to bother with the quality of the content. Secondly, the anchor text, a strong Google ranking factor, is also chosen according to customer’s preferences. These two reasons are enough to effectively manipulate search engine rankings which is why this SEO technique is classified as a serious black hat.
#2 Spam Comments
Have you ever witnessed the situation where a newly submitted comment on your website turned out to be a… spammer’s with its worthless message and non-related promotional link?
Exactly, these are the actions we’re referring to.
Spam comments are intended to create free backlinks. Links gained in this way are 100% ‘nofollow’ and transfer no SEO juice, which makes this technique a real waste of time.
Nonetheless, it is currently one of most popular black hat practices. What is more, it is not always done manually, there are even various tools available to automatically sprinkle spam comments across the Web.
If your blog is open for commenting without anyone to control their quality, sooner or later you are going to get spam comments which will leave a negative impression on the users and lower the quality of their user experience. That’s why it’s better to prevent spam comments before they make your readers feel uncomfortable and discourage them from leaving any valuable comments.
Remember, spam comments also harm your blog by making it look neglected and unprofessional. This is why you should wait and approve the comments after filtering out the spam using blocking plugins.
#3 Duplicate Content
As the name suggests, duplicate content refers to the well-known “copy and paste” content creation practice across domains and means that blocks of copied content from different sources exactly match each other or look very much alike. Search engines prefer unique content which is why content purposely duplicated across different domains is perceived as one of the worst black hat techniques. When the same results are found in the Google listing, it is a clear sign of manipulation of search engine rankings and it usually results in poor user experience.
Duplicate content concerns not only different domains but also one domain. However, the second case isn’t as serious because it’s usually a sign of lack of knowledge or neglect. Therefore, it is crucial to implement a canonical tag to indicate the original version of your article. This way, you make other copies invisible for Googlebots.
#4 Article Spinning
Article spinning is a technique similar to the duplicate content issue (above) and is continually getting more popular. This is next level plagiarism and it involves using special software which takes the copied source and rephrases it for later use as a “new”, “unique” post. Modification efficiently cuts down the risk of being detected by any plagiarism tool.
#5 Cloaking
What happens when you insert the term “cloaking” into the Google search bar? You will be given a Google Knowledge result which first explains “cloaking” as a search engine technique that presents completely different content or URL to the user than to the search engine spider.
In fact, this SEO method is considered deceptive because it tricks search engines in order to get the desired ranks for target keywords. Moreover, it’s a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines because, in most cases, it serves people with irrelevant results.
Search Console Help provides us with most common cloaking examples:
Serving a page of HTML text to search engines while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the user-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor.
How this works in practice:
Matt Cutts knows this Black Hat SEO Technique best:
Once negative ranking factors such as, JavaScript-Hidden Content, Empty Link Anchors or Meta/JavaScript Redirects are spotted by Google, it may end up with receiving cloaking penalties, which can devastate your website’s long-term performance.
#6 Doorway Pages
In other words, gateway pages, jump pages or bridge pages which are specially optimized for targeted keywords and designed to rank high for particular queries. These landing pages have very little value and are solely used to trick the search engines and transfer a visitor from a chosen result to another, unrelated destination.
#7 Keyword Stuffing
This well-known black hat SEO technique is no longer as applicable as it used to be in the past.
Now, search engines are too smart to get dodged with this simple trick.
By definition, keyword stuffing involves overusing the same keywords throughout one page in order to maximize its visibility and organic traffic. Content stuffed with keywords doesn’t look natural and because of this, it’s not user-friendly. Positionly’s Website Optimization Grader can detect keyword stuffing on your page and warn you about it’s consequences. Try it now!
Discover 5 Ways to Create Findable Content Without Keyword Stuffing.
#8 Invisible Text
To put this straight, invisible text means implementing white text, a list of keywords, on a white background. This method makes keywords completely invisible to a visitor, but search engines can still detect and index them.
Consequences
Black hat techniques are quite risky to practice because they are usually detected sooner or later. Consequently, a website can be banned or penalized. Being banned is rare because it means an ultimate removal of a particular website from the SERPs. Penalization is a much more common consequence to pay for negative SEO and involves lowering a website’s rank.
Finally, I’ve got an interesting infographic presenting a comparison between white hat and black hat techniques for you!
Do you know any other black hat SEO techniques that are gaining more popularity?
Which technique frustrates you the most?
Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.
Read Next:
What is the difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO? under Rankings and algorithms.
Kasia Perzyńska
Latest posts by Kasia Perzyńska (see all)
- Be Prepared for Negative SEO and How to Protect Your Website - October 11, 2016
I see allot of link exchange websites in local niches, this is something businesses should know no longer works, along with business directory listings in totally unrelated niches.
If you want to rank and avoid penalties do things right you will prosper in the long run.
Curiosity question…If a spam comment hits my website, but I mark it as spam and don’t approve it so it doesn’t show on my site, will it still hurt my SEO? Thanks for this good article. -Vickie
Hey Vickie! If you don’t approve it there is no reason to worry about because you don’t allow any spam comments to your blog :-). thank you for asking this. Let me know, if you have more questions.
Kasia
I Wonder that why is this strategies do people for their sites. I think most people done this b’coz of ignorance. Thanks for great info.
One black hat technique is to do things to attack the top ranking pages if you are in a business industry. For example: I used to work with a web dev company, and one of our clients suddenly tanked on Google search listings, upon further investigation an unscrupulous SEO company had purposely gone through directory listings and purposely changed the name of the business and the address, and also went through creating a bunch of unrelated duplicate listings on those sites. This severely affected a client and took a while to clean up the mess. Instead of creating high quality content and doing things the ‘right way’ they chose to try and sink a competing business, and at the same time probably charging the client they were working for a small fortune to do bad practices that could get a site blacklisted from Google.
Did you create the website by yourself or paid for it to be created by the professionals?
It’s exciting, but my mind-set about SEO has changed… I used to over-think it, trying to come up with the “right” variety of periods to use key keywords. Now I just motivate our authors to pay attention to providing something of value to our users’ lifestyles in every publish. I then look to see if I can develop the headline to create it both catchier and stickier. It seems to be operating. Search engines just increased our web pagerank from a 4 to a 5 and visitors went from 280,000 to 500,000 trips and from 800,000 to 1.5 thousand page views a 30 days.
Good List, Kasia! But one of the most used and (powerful) BH methods is missing: Private Blog Networks. Any experience with this?
Hi Maciej, personally I don’t have any experience with this, and you? 🙂
Private Blog Network is a gray hat/black hat tactic of using a set of multiple sites to funnel link juice to other sites (so-called “money sites”).
I totally could also include this one within my list. Thank you!
Here is an excellent piece describing the issue of PBN https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2374165/the-private-blog-network-purge-are-you-at-risk
Happy to read such a advance subject
But this article probably very informative to those who are unaware about black hack techniques people use to generate traffic.
Cloacking is a kind of black hat SEO, used to present the content on the webpage to the search engine spiders, it deliver a different content that the user browse in search. Great Post. Thanks for sharing this article.
What is Gray Hat seo?
Hi Naveed,
Take a look at this piece Grey Hat SEO Techniques: Should You Use Them?
Hope this will help you out 😉
Cheers,
Kasia
I noticed a few months ago a new competitor company I had never heard of before started posting hundreds of spam blog posts with nonsense content for the purposes of link building. Digging deeper I found they have 3 websites! They have different pages for every keyword with pretty much duplicate content paraphrased. I’ve tried to report them but all 3 sites are on the first page of google! How long until Google notices this and penalizes them?
Yes, i agree, if you’ve learned a few things about black vs white hat, you’ll know that it tends to be easier going the dark side. However just because they call it black doesn’t mean its bad. Buying links on other sites is a way of improving your backlink portfolio and can push you up in the serps and spinning your content can also help google to recognize you as a guy who knows what he’s talking about..even if it is a little unreadable sometimes. Some of the best things to do is just slap some ppc ads on yoru website and send traffic. Don’t shoot for easy places like chitika or adcash, shoot for higher end networks like adsense to monetize the best. If you can push your way up in google the original way with backlinks thats great, but another option is sape links. These can punch you to the top really fast and is my favorite way to achieve lots of search engine traffic. Thanks for the info sweety.
It is time to get method, after electing the awareness and aspect of the website. The consequences will let you comprehend the Page Title, Meta Tag info, and common phrases occurring on the leaves in a region by side investigation.
Agreed, but above paid links, stuffing, seo, invisible text, there are other options, you can just buy traffic. We’ve purchased lots from places like adwords, infolinks, http://twittervisits.com. Social media traffic from facebook and twitter is very targetable now with the height of advertising platforms. Another factor in raising your SE rank is actually getting clicks on your SE link. This is actually the highest factor in your ranking. So in a normal scenerio, you’re at #4 and getting more clicks than #1, google recognizes this and moves you up to maybe #1. So, this is just another way to boost your rank above and beyond all the average joes who have no idea. For me, I simply prefer buying traffic, even media buys such as big banners and of course analytics such as comscore or hitwise to determine whos real and who actually wants product. Thx for the thoughts.
I can see you embedded some videos from YouTube. I have a Mobile phone review website. And in so many of my quality unique contents I do embed random relevant videos to them. I want to know if am doing something wrong by embedding. Cos I know coping just the links will be bad.
Hi, Joseph,
Don’t worry adding embedded videos won’t harm your SEO. However, sometimes embedded might be in the form of iframe and iframes are not especially recommended for your on page SEO.
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Hi there,
Thank you and I definitely will take a look at yours 😉
Cheers,
Kasia
Good article Kasia. I agree with pretty much all of your points. But there are definitely places for paid links and the sort, as long as they are not over done and are worked in with natural SEO, you’re going to be good and it can REALLY help.
wonderful article..
Mam, Can your send me a tutorial for black hat & white hat seo.
I m a beginer in SEO I m looking forward to becomme efficient in SEO
Hi there, as soon as we write one - for sure. 🙂
Just please subscribe to our mailing list —> https://positionly.com/newsletter and you will be updated weekly
Hello Everyone and our expert Kasia Perzyńska
Well my question is that what if I want to redirect a url to another. Is there any code or something which can help because I want it for my promotion business not for the seo.(promotion business context to affiliate links) Anyone can help to find a suitable code with any of the techniques like iFrames, robot.txt or any other will be really very helpful.
Hi there,
If you want to redirect URLs read this pieceWhat is a HTTP 301 redirect and a HTTP 302 redirect?
Thank you so much for your awesome information about Black hat SEO technique 🙂
My pleasure, Prakash 🙂