What Is Black Hat SEO Techniques? A Definition
Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices that are used to increases a site or page's rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines' terms of service. The term "black hat" originated in Western movies to distinguish the "bad guys" from the "good guys," who wore white hats (See White Hat SEO). Recently, it's used more commonly to describe computer hackers, virus creators, and those who perform unethical actions with computers.
In this article, you'll learn:
It's crucial to realize that implementing Black Hat SEO tactics and strategies can get your site banned from search engines, excluding you from the number one traffic referral source on the Internet. All SEO's need a proper understanding of Black Hat SEO and its consequences.
What Is Black Hat SEO, Anyway?
Black Hat SEO is most commonly defined as a disapproved practice that nevertheless could increase a page's ranking in a search engine result page (SERP). These practices are against the search engine's terms of service and can result in the site being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites. A list of tactics and strategies employed by black hat SEO practitioners have been openly denounced on Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Bing's Webmaster Guidelines.
"Is the work that I'm doing adding value to the user or am I just doing this for search engines to see?" is a litmus test on whether an SEO tactic would go against a search engine's webmaster guideline. If no value is added to the user, but rankings are likely to increase, then your decisions are highly likely to be black hat. The same test can be applied to paid search practices to determine whether an activity is considered black hat PPC.
Recognized Black Hat SEO Tactics
The following SEO tactics are considered black hat and should not be exercised at all if you want to stay above board with Google and other search engines.
Content Automation Doorway Pages Hidden Text or Links Keyword Stuffing Reporting a Competitor (or Negative SEO) Sneaky Redirects Cloaking Link Schemes Guest Posting Networks Link Manipulation (including buying links) Article Spinning Link Farms, Link Wheels, or Link Networks Rich Snippet Markup Spam Automated Queries to Google Creating pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, trojans, and other malware
How To Report Black Hat SEO
There are two reasons why you may report a black hat SEO. Either your website has been attacked through a malicious hack, virus, or negative SEO campaign of spammy links, or you see spammy web results on a competitive keyword your website is ranking on. For the latter, you may file a webspam report through Google Webmaster Tools. Please use this tool with discretion. SPAM does not stand for search positions above mine! Falsely reporting webspam could be considered black hat SEO.
If your website has been attacked through a malicious hack, virus, or malware, request for a malware review after you've removed the malicious code.
In the event that your website is the target of a negative SEO campaign of spammy links, use the Disavow Links Tool in Google Webmaster Tools after you've tried to contact webmasters who are pointing these links to your website to have them removed.
Why Should You Avoid Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO tactics can get your website banned from Google and other search engines.
Though there may be some short-term success through increased traffic to your site, Google penalties are getting more and more sophisticated and can have devastating effects on your rankings and traffic. With hundreds of millions of users searching on Google per day, can you really afford to be de-indexed?
Are Black Hat SEO Techniques For You?
If your answer is yes, you should avoid Black Hat SEO at all costs. Rather, you should look for alternative means of improving your search engine rankings.
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Misconceptions About Link Building that ought to Be Disregarded Immediately
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