Black Hat in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the use of search engine optimization strategies, techniques, and tactics that focuses only on the search engine and not on the human audience.
An example of a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) is doorway pages, invisible texts, keyword stuffing, and additional unrelated keywords to the content of a page or swaps a page.
What are the most used techniques of black hat search engine optimization (SEO)?
These people who try to outsmart the rules established by the search engine and tries to increase the organic traffic of their website uses these risky practices.
Paid links
This is the most effective technique that can manipulate the search engine rankings. Why? The quality of the content is not that important, once the transaction is done, the text is anchored according to the preference of the user.
Spam comments
It is done to create a free backlink, the comments are worthless and do not relate to the content. However, spam comments can affect the credibility of the website, it can give an impression of unprofessional and neglect. Thus, it is better to prevent spam comments through filtering it out with blocking plug-ins.
Duplicate content
Search engines prefer unique contents, thus some purposely copy and paste the content to very much look alike with the other sources. This is the reason why some users have used the canonical tag to indicate that the content is the original version.
Article Spinning
This is a similar technique with the duplicate content, it is associated with plagiarism. A tool is utilized to rephrase the content from a copied source. Modifying the content can effectively lower the risk of being detected by a plagiarism tool.
Cloaking
This technique is the most deceptive method, it deceives the search engine to reach the desired rank through target keywords. It presents a different content and link to the user, thus it gives an irrelevant result.
There are two sets of content, a content for bots and a content for the users. The black hat provides an updated list of bot IP addresses, which will serve the bots with fabricated content packed with targeted keywords. The false information boosts the website ranking, and the users will not find a relevant information.
Doorway Pages
These pages have a little value and are solely used to trick the search engines and redirect them to another page that is unrelated to the chosen result.
Keyword Stuffing
This is a simple trick that does no longer work for the search engine bots can quickly detect it. Keyword stuffing involves overusing the same keywords throughout one page in order to maximize the visibility and organic traffic.
Invisible Text
Invisible text or also called white texts are used, unrelated keywords are used but are invisible to the visitor. However, the search engine can still detect them.
Most of the users of black hat search engine optimization are those who are seeking a quick financial return on their website, rather for a long-term investment. Black hat SEO can possibly result in the website being banned from the major search engines.
However, most experts who use black hat search engine optimization techniques consider being banned from the major search engine as an irrelevant risk.
