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What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO describes any SEO practice that goes against search engine guidelines. They’re often unethical and sometimes even illegal, with the main purpose being to help websites rank quickly by manipulating search engines and users, and by attacking competitor sites.
The opposite to Black Hat SEO is White Hat SEO, which follows good SEO practices. You may also hear the phrase Grey Hat SEO, which refers to dubious techniques that aren’t necessarily against guidelines, but may well be in the future.
Effects of Black Hat SEO on Your Site
While ranking quickly through SEO work sounds great, doing so via Black Hat techniques will usually have a negative effect in the long run. Search engine guidelines are there to help website owners create positive user experiences and to provide content that is most useful to searchers. Usually these methods take longer to establish, which is why SEO should be a long-term strategy.
If Google or another search engine finds a site has been trying to take a shortcut, it’s likely to issue a penalty, which will lead to a significant drop in your website rankings. Getting your site back up to good standing can take months or even years.
In the meantime, while you claw back your original rankings, you’re losing traffic, have damaged your reputation, and aren’t making any sales. Black Hat SEO is bad for business.
How to Fix Black Hat SEO
If you have been using – or know that someone else has been using – Black Hat SEO on your website, you should start rectifying it now. Run a site audit and start making changes that follow best practices (which I’ll come to below).
If you have used, or are using, an SEO freelancer or agency that has implemented poor techniques, they are doing more harm and good. Make a move to a reputable provider instead.
Black Hat SEO Strategies to Avoid
Bad Link Building Practices
Link building is a good thing when done correctly, but bad link building is one of the areas where many users trip up. In general, links should be earned, not paid for. If a link is paid for or sponsored (for example, through provision of a product), the link must have a rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attribute. This works both ways, so remember to add these tags if your site includes paid or sponsored links.
Other bad link building practices include:
- Link farms: Link farms are websites made only for link building purposes. All they include is lots of links to external sites. If your website is listed on lots of these, you’re likely to face a penalty.
- Private Blog Networks (PBNs): Similar to link farms, but using authoritative sites. PBNs are usually created by buying sites that have a good reputation but are no longer in use under the original guise. You can be penalised both by creating PBNs and by linking to your website from them.
- Comment spam: Commenting excessively on other blogs with a link to your site. The comments are usually irrelevant and often nonsensical.
- Forum spam: Link comment spam but via online forums
- Spammy directories and bookmarking sites: Similar to link farms and PBNs. They differ from genuine, well-established directories such as Yelp and Google Business Manager.
What to do instead:
- Focus on reaching out and building relationships with related sites that might publish guest posts from you.
- Create useful and informative content that other sites want to reference and link to.
- Comment on other blogs, but make sure your comments are useful and relevant, and don’t overdo it.
- List your business on genuine directories. There are lots out there, including general business sites (like Yelp), local directories (like your local newspaper), and industry-specific (like TripAdvisor).
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the practice of filling your page with an excessive number of keywords in the hopes that you’ll rank better. This is often done with no regard for the usefulness or readability of the page, and will often include a large number of repetitive or badly structured sentences.
In some cases sites will simply list keywords and make no attempt to create useful content.
Another practice is using hidden text. In this method, coding is used to insert text that is hidden from a human user, but visible to search engines. This is an attempt to keyword stuff a page without affecting user experience. However, search engines recognise this technique too, and will penalise a site for it.
What to do instead:
Pick a small number of keywords and include those through naturally written text. It’s okay to insert the same keyword more than once in a page, but don’t overdo it. Get more tips from my guide on how to write good website copy.
Duplicate Content
Google and other search engines place a lot of importance on good content. That’s why using duplicate content is a Black Hat technique: it’s usually low-effort and done in an attempt to manipulate rankings.
Content can be duplicated across your own website, or from other sites. One common example of internal duplication is when a business covers a large service area. They might create a separate page for each town served, with the same content and only minor changes to the location. This is Black Hat SEO and should be avoided.
What to do instead:
Write original content that isn’t copied word-for-word from other sites, and avoid using the same content across multiple pages. If you serve a large area, include some key locations on a single page. Even if you don’t name every town, village, and hamlet, search engines are now smart enough to recognise the area you cover. You can also make use of a free Google Business Profile or Bing Local Business Listing if you serve a local area.
Cloaking
Cloaking involves showing real users and search engines something different. It’s a technique often used to sell illegal items, or to hide from a website owner that their site has been hacked.
What to do instead:
Unless you’re doing something illegal, chances are you’re not intentionally cloaking your site. However, if you think you might have been hacked, Google provides useful guidance about spotting and fixing hacked sites.
Sneaky Redirects
Redirecting sends a user to a different page than they originally tried to access. It’s a legitimate SEO technique that helps with site structure, particularly when pages have been removed.
Sneaky redirects, on the other hand, are redirects with malicious intent. They could be used to cloak a site or to redirect a user to a completely different page to what they were expecting.
What to do instead:
Sneaky redirects may drive more traffic to a specific page (until Google discovers what you’re doing), but if the page isn’t what users want, they aren’t going to buy from you. Remember that more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more sales. Instead, focus on creating content that is engaging and draws the right kind of user in. They’re much more likely to then trust you as a business, and to purchase from you.
If you think you already have sneaky redirects on your site, run an audit using a tool like Redirect Checker, which lists any active redirects on your site. Analyse the results and ensure they’re all legitimate. If not, update them.
Misusing Structured Data
Structured data is a way of highlighting specific information in search engine results, such as reviews and recipes. It helps you stand out and can increase click-through-rates. Structured data is created through adding code to your site.
Misusing structured data involves inserting code with either incorrect or fake information. For example, you might highlight a fake review that has been created deliberately to mislead users.
What to do instead:
There’s no easy route to getting good reviews. Work hard to provide an excellent service, and ask your customers for reviews on a legitimate site. Read the guide to using online reviews for SEO.
Doorways
A single page will usually rank for multiple keywords. However, the use of so-called doorway pages aims to create multiple low-quality pages all targeting a specific search query. The user is then redirected to the ‘real’ content. The aim is to have the same site appear multiple times in one search, so that the one business takes up more space and prevents competitors from being seen.
Doorway pages are created for search engines, not for the user. As a result, they make for a poor user experience and can skew legitimate rankings. They often go hand-in-hand with sneaky redirects and cloaking.
Be aware that doorway pages are not the same as purpose-built landing pages, which are legitimate and valuable pages that form part of an SEO or PPC campaign.
What to do instead:
Focus on writing a single page that is informative, valuable and well presented for real users. Follow good SEO practices to improve your rankings and to target relevant keywords. Optimise other profiles such as social media sites, social media posts and directory listings so that they appear in searches too, legitimately taking up more space in the rankings.
User-Generated Spam
User-generated content is – to an extent – beyond your control. It often includes comments on blogs or posts in website forums. User-generated content can be extremely helpful for SEO as it provides fresh, updated content. However, it can get spammy and, if you let it get out of control, you risk being penalised. User-generated spam can also include comments from bots.
You’ve probably seen this kind of content, particularly if you have a WordPress website. These are the comments that include nonsense text, generic comments such as “wow, this is the best blog I’ve ever read”, and links to external sites.
What to do instead:
- Make use of tools like reCAPTCHA (which is free) to add an extra layer of security to your site.
- If you already have a lot of spam, go through the comments and remove them as soon as possible.
- Update comment settings so that there is a review process, preventing bots and spammers from posting to your site automatically. You can then approve or disapprove comments as they come in.
The quicker you react to user-generated spam, the less likely it will negatively affect your site.
Excessive AI Content
Google will not penalise every site that uses AI content. However, it will penalise sites that use AI excessively, to the extent that the content is poor, inaccurate, repetitive or anything else that negatively affects the user experience.
If you’ve ever copied and pasted a large chunk of AI-generated text into your website from a chatbot, without checking or editing it, you could be inadvertently using Black Hat SEO techniques.
What to do instead:
There are no guidelines to say that you can’t use AI-generated content on your website and Google’s own AI guidelines state that high-quality content is rewarded, no matter how it’s produced. That means that you can use AI, but that, in general, a human should have oversight. Any content that is generated by AI should be the result of clear instructions that help fine-tune the content. It should also be checked by a real person to make sure information is correct and that the content is generally of good quality.
Conclusion
While this is not an exhaustive list of Black Hat SEO techniques, it covers many of the most common methods that you may have inadvertently used yourself, or come across on your own site and others. They include link spam, keyword spam, excessive AI use, and cloaking attempts. These are strategies that should be avoided at all costs, or you risk a huge drop in your rankings that can be time-consuming and costly to fix.
If you – or someone else – have already implemented any of these on your site, make sure you rectify them as soon as possible. Make use of legitimate SEO practices to bring your site back up to scratch.
Remember, SEO is a long-term strategy, so if an SEO method promises big results quickly, then there’s a good chance it’s Black Hat.