What Is Black Hat SEO and Its 5 Unethical Techniques?

As a businessman trying to appear on top of Google search results, it is crucial to know what is black hat SEO. This is a practice against the guidelines of search engines. Some people use this SEO technique to make their website rank higher in Google search results.

Those tactics are unethical and won’t give benefit searchers. Often, those tactics will make search engines give a penalty to websites. Black hat search engine optimization usually includes some techniques like using private link networks, cloaking, and keyword stuffing.

What Is Black Hat SEO’s Famous Technique

As mentioned above, a black hat will use some different techniques that are unethical and shouldn’t be used by websites that try to be on top of search results. Below are some techniques of black hat search engine optimization.

Keyword stuffing

This technique is a practice of filling website content with many irrelevant keywords. The goal of this technique is to manipulate the position of page ranks on Google search results pages. Adding multiple keyword variations that don’t add value will create a terrible experience for visitors.

This will also make your page rank for all irrelevant queries. Unlike white hat SEO, the black hat keyword stuffing technique doesn’t make users love your website. This technique includes repeating the same phrases or words too often so that they won’t sound natural.

Cloaking

This technique involves displaying a piece of content to visitors and a totally different piece to search engines. Websites that practice this technique will do cloaking to make the content rank for various terms that are all irrelevant to the real content they’re offering.

Spam websites often do the cloaking technique to hide from search engine bots so that those bots won’t figure out the spam content websites are serving to visitors. Adjusting the content of your website to different visitor groups is acceptable.

But you should never change the content of your website that appears for the crawlers of search engines. If everything you do benefits your website visitors, it is acceptable.

Sneaky redirects

What is black hat SEO’s other technique? Sneaky redirects are a technique that sends a visitor to another URL instead of the URL he wants to visit. Redirects must be used only for the purpose they are designed. For example, you can use redirects when you change the domain of your website.

Or, you can use redirects when you consolidate two different contents. You can also use JavaScript in redirecting visitors on different occasions. For example, LinkedIn will redirect visitors to the full profile of some people when visitors are logged in.

Sneaky redirects are not an ethical solution since those redirects violate search engines’ guidelines. Understanding black hat SEO definitions will help you avoid unethical techniques like this.

Poor quality posts

Content with poor quality and no value to visitors is another unethical practice in the black hat. An example of what is black hat SEO’s poor-quality posts are posting content that’s scraped from other websites. Google search engines may not be too good at recognizing content copied from other sites.

Many websites with duplicate content can experience search rankings’ instant hit. Since 2011, Google became much better at recognizing low-quality content and duplicate content. Another prohibited practice is adding invisible keywords to the website’s content.

Some websites are doing this technique by adding some invisible keywords in the same color as the background color of the site.

Paid links

The next black hat SEO example is the use of paid links. Google and some other search engines ban the selling and buying of links. Any link that’s used to manipulate a website’s ranking will be considered part of the link scheme actions which is a violation of Webmaster Guidelines of Google.

This action includes sending free products to a website so that you can get some links in return. You must never pay another website to link to the content of your website. Google is going to penalize sellers and buyers of links after detecting this practice.

Understanding what is black hat SEO isn’t enough. You need to know all prohibited practices and then use the legal ones. Combine some practices of white hat SEO with an effective marketing tool like Hitech Terminal Enterprise from SMS Broadcaster to make your website more famous.