What are SEO Black Hat Techniques?

We define Black Hat SEO as techniques that are mainly used to get top search ranking in different search engines. Black hat techniques include:

· Breaking SEO rules and regulations.

· Due to the Black Hat techniques utilized on websites, create a poor experience to your users.

· Presents content in various non-visual or visual ways to many search engine spiders and users.

All SEO techniques fall under 2 categories: white and black. White SEO techniques are the ones you want to shoot for, and black hat techniques are the ones you want to avoid. Summed up, basically Black Hat SEO techniques trick and manipulate search engines to give the specific website a high ranking mostly via false keyword optimization. Every marketer or site developer/webmaster wants his site successful. So a ‘high ranking’ is the catch word for all. Websites have to follow certain SEO and keyword optimization techniques in order to rank high in the search list results.

Using SEO Black Hat techniques will make you rise in the search results list very quickly and make your website number one, however, it is strictly prohibited by Google and other major search engines and you will be penalized and possibly banned if you are found using these methods. Some of these methods include:

1. Hidden text:

Text that is visible to the search engines but is invisible to humans. It is mainly accomplished by using text in the same color as the background color of the page. This is primarily used to place extra keywords without making the page look like spam. This is, however, very easy to track by the search engines.

2. Stuffing some keywords into your content:

This is the most known and common technique of Black Hat SEO. In this technique, the owner of the website inserts large numbers of key phrases or words without having any related meaning. This can also be caught easily because of the incorrect sentence structure.

3. Doorway pages:

Doorway pages involve the creation of pages that users are not ever intended to see, for the sole purpose of driving SEO traffic to another page. Using this technique will usually get you straight-up banned. They are also known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, and entry pages.

4. Duplicate websites:

For the purpose of website promotion, some webmasters develop duplicate websites of their original sites. By making two or more websites with the exact same content, they are able to rank higher with those specific keywords, but on the downside, they are also using not only Black Hat SEO techniques, but will also fail Google’s duplicate content check.

5. Cloaking:

Cloaking describes the technique of providing a different page to search engine spiders than what a human visitor is shown. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms of Service of most search engines and results in banning of the website.

Basically, we can say that Black Hat techniques can bring great amounts of traffic initially, but I the end, the price is just not worth it. Search engines penalize and ban the websites using these techniques, and it is near impossible to get decent traffic without being indexed in search engines. It is also very easy to get traffic without using Black Hat methods, so don’t risk it.