What is Black Hat Seo?

Many people have their own opinions on exactly what techniques constitute Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is basically using any unethical (devious) methods to rank higher on search engines. Black Hat Seo in my opinion is not a certain death sentence for you website, I like to use what I refer to as Grey Hat techniques that are not likely to get your website penalized.

Some of the most frowned upon Black Hat SEO methods include the following:

 Link Farms This is a method where many sites link to each other to mutually up their incoming links. It can be detected since there is a very high number of mutual links and they are generally out of context.

Obvious Link Buying (or selling) certain sites sell links on their pages knowing the value of them. In general, buying a link is not likely to harm your site but you may be wasting your money. Search engines try to spot the sites selling links and downgrade or ignore the links coming from the site. If a website openly advertises that they sell links then I would not buy a link from them.

Hidden text Hiding text in a web page is always a bad thing. Older techniques of putting the text as the same colors as the background or using css to hide it are easily spotted and pointless. If you have text on a page, make sure that it can be seen. The only exceptions to this are navigation buttons which require javascript or css and the content may be used as a backup (for browsers that cannot use javascript for example). In these cases, the text that cannot be seen should be relevant and not deceiving.

Spamming Spam in this context is over stuffing your pages with text that does not read well. If a page has text stuffed in that is there for the sole purpose of keyword stuffing then it is spam. It is much better to write proper text for humans that contain the keywords that you want to be on the page.

Cloaking This is a technique where software delivers a different page to the spiders as it does for the humans to fool the spider into thinking that the page is about something else. Sometimes there may be a genuine reason to do this (formatting for different platforms etc.) but in this case the content should be pretty similar.

 A few vague definitions of Black Hat SEO as found on the web:

Spamdexing involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a …

The opposite of White Hat SEO is sometimes called spamdexing. Black Hat SEO can be any optimization strategies that cause a site to rank more highly than its content would otherwise justify…

Black Hat search engine optimization are unethical techniques that are used to get higher search rankings. Black hat SEO techniques usually break search engine rules and regulations and generally create poor user experience.

This term refers to using deceptive or unethical techniques to get high rankings in search engines; for example hidden text, cloaking and link …

Black-hat SEO is optimizing web pages using dubious techniques that violate search engine guidelines, such as sneaky redirects, cloaking and invisible text. …

Involves a number of unethical methods designed to manipulate search engines into giving a web site higher rankings.

Unethical or illegitimate techniques used in SEO that do not follow the search engine guidelines, in order to get quicker results. But these do not last for long and if picked up by Google, would also end up in penalizing or even banning of the website

 Black hat SEO are the techniques used to fool the search engines in order to bring in more traffic to websites. …

Where does the phrase Black Hat SEO some from?

In movie, a “Black hat” was someone in a western movie (usually a villain) who would wear a black hat in contrast to the hero’s white hat. An almost perfect reference will be the popular western cowboy movie ” The Good The Bad and the Ugly.”