Black hat SEO refers to practices of cheating search engines to gain faster rankings in ways that are against Google’s terms of service.
Even though you can get fast results this way, it doesn’t pay off in the long run — once search engines figure out you are gaming the system, your website will get banned. On top of that, there’s a possibility your affiliate partners or sponsors will drop you as well.
What are popular black hat SEO techniques?
Here is an overview of the most common black hat SEO techniques, make sure not to do any of these.
- Spinning articles,
- Keyword stuffing,
- Running link farms,
- Sneaky website redirects,
- Posting duplicate content,
- Using doorway pages on the website,
- Manipulating links (including affiliate links),
- Reporting competitors without a good reason,
- Having hidden links or text within page content,
- Running negative SEO campaigns on competitors,
- Managing guest posting networks and sharing guest posts among them,
How to report black hat SEO techniques?
In case you notice your website is getting attacked with black hat SEO techniques, you will need to take immediate action.
You can file a web spam report via the Google Webmaster Tools; but be careful, the process of reporting spam falsely using this tool can be considered as black hat SEO under the right conditions.
Understanding the risks of black hat SEO.
If you are new to SEO, black hat methods will look appealing.
However, it is also important to be aware of the negative consequences that come along with it. Most websites that use black hat SEO techniques end up losing their search engine rankings: they don’t deliver long-term results. When there is an update in search engine algorithms, your website will likely go down.
It is also important to keep in mind that black hat SEO can result in poor overall user experience.
For example, if you stuff your web pages with keywords, people will have a difficult time understanding the content. This will increase bounce rates and you will lose your rankings.
