What is Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO, is a form of search engine optimization where a website uses ill practices in order to artificially improve their rankings for search queries. These practices often break service agreements and can lead to penalties.
What are some Black Hat SEO Techniques?
There is an extensive list of shady black hat SEO techniques that will get you flagged up by crawlers, below are some of them.
1. Injected backlinks
According to the startup Linxact with the mission to make Black Hat SEO transparent, some Black Hat SEOs exploit vulnerabilities in popular Content Mangement Systems (CMSs) like Wordpress to inject backlinks to their own websites or clients' websites.
To hide injected outbound links of their targets, they hide them with modified CSS code from the website owner. Such injected backlinks are often shortened to keep control over the link target even after an exploit has been fixed by an update. Such Black Hat SEOs can also be considered as Black Hat hackers.
2. Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
Private Blog Networks (PBNs) are very popular amongst Black Hat SEOs because they're very effective while keeping risks of a Google penalty low if done right. Beware of using this method because it still can get your website penalized.
This is especially the case with cheap PBN services that sell backlinks from their PBN sites to anyone which makes those PBNs basically public instead of private.
If you want to find out whether your website or your competitors websites have any PBN backlinks, you need to use a hidden backlink checker like Linxact, since most PBNs block ordinary backlink checkers such as Ahrefs, Majestic and Semrush etc.
3. Content Duplication and Article Spinning
In order to rank highly in SERPs, Google looks for original and quality content on web pages. Content which has been copied and pasted from another source will not achieve the same results, even if it may save time and money.
Article spinning, also a form of plagiarism, is received the same way. This is a type of automated writing achieved by using content spinning programs. These programs change the arrangement of words in a sentence to give the illusion of unique content.
4. Keyword Stuffing
Integrating keywords into your content is essential for good SEO.
However, keyword stuffing, which means overloading text with an unnatural number of keywords, negatively affects your SEO.
And don’t think that by hiding keywords within your text will fool Google’s crawlers. This technique will also be picked up on and flagged up.
5. Link Buying
Although including inbound links from high-quality sites boosts SERP ranking, purchasing links for your site is strictly prohibited.
While it may seem that buying links will boost your site’s legitimacy, it has the opposite effect and is easily detectable.
6. Doorway and Gateway Pages
Doorway and Gateway pages redirect a user to a different landing page once they have clicked on the link. These landing pages are usually unrelated to the searcher’s query but are dense in keywords.
While this technique is slightly harder to discover, it is still visible to crawlers.