The online world is moving fast forward. To stick in this words is a little bit difficult. People want the result in less time. So there is the rise of a term black hat SEO.
To rank in the SERP it is important to obey the search engine rules. In this article, I am going to take Google. Google makes some rules to rank a page in the SERP. But the hard truth is, it’s time and effort taking.
Some people don’t like to put time and effort into this. They want the result soon. So what should they? They have to break the rule of Google.
Sometimes we don’t want to be bound in the set of rules. Some people are curious to break the rule. So this is the main reason behind the term black hat SEO.
After hearing this term you may get curious about what is black hat SEO. It is obvious.
What is black hat SEO?
Before going to any discussion, let’s know this first.
Black hat SEO is a practice against search engine guidelines often used to get an instant boost in site ranking higher in search results.
The black hat SEO practices include many tricks. We will see what those tricks are later in this article.
Basically, it finds the flaws in the search engines and uses them for better ranking. Although search engines are smart, they hope that may be their strategies are smarter and will help them against the search engines.
Keep in mind that search engines are very smart and your plan to use the flaws is not going to lasts longer. Search engines are very strict to their rules. So breaking their rules is horrible.
A brief history of black hat SEO
Let’s move backward in time. No need to ride in a time machine. Now think about the era of 90’s. Internet and search engine was in initial stages.
Google was a newborn baby. The word “SEO” was in the wild west and no one has any idea of it.
In this chaotic and lawless era of SEO, everything went. Content creators and writers could use keyword stuffing until they were tired. If you wanted to build a PVN (Private Virtual Network) for linking each other and boost the rankings, you could do it. Those times sound like a good time.
With the arrival of the 21st century, Google was on its way to dominating the silly behavior. Google consistently publishing updates after updates and the sun of black hat techniques starts shrinking.
Then people became aware of the importance of SEO and started working on it. As the SEO world has evolved from a black history, the opposite world is named white hat SEO.
In this sophisticated and AI world, some people also use some black hat SEO techniques to boost the search ranking. So you may think that is it still working on it? Should I use these techniques now?
My simple and one line answer is, stay out of this practices. Your site may be banned from search engines.
Tricks that are considered black hat SEO?
Google treated these techniques as black hat SEO.
Keyword stuffing:
excessively optimizing a content using a keyword by overusing it in the content.
Link farming:
Creating a network of sites just to link to each other and earn higher rankings.
Buying links:
To maintain Domain Authority, websites owners paying high authority domains to link to their sites.
Low-quality guest posting:
Without providing value to readers, just writing a guest post on another site for the sake of linking to your own sites.
False headlines:
Click baiting with an attractive headline and redirecting visitors to an anonymous page or piece of content.
Article spinning:
Recreate the existing article using tools in a unique way.
Scraping: stealing a content from another site’s and using it to get some traffic to your site.
Footer spam:
Rather than providing value to the user, just stuffing links in the footer for the sole purpose of ranking.
Hidden text and links:
Creating certain links or texts invisible to visitors with the intent of SEO.
Spam comments:
Link building to your site in the other websites’ comment sections with silly commenting.
Using irrelevant keywords: Using irrelevant keywords into an old piece of content.
Gateway (doorway) pages: To design a webpage for throwing visitors to another page of a website.
Matching domain: creating a site based on the same name as a particular keyword.
Content automation: using a software tool or script that automatically generate and publish content.
Cloaking: presenting one piece of content to visitors and another piece of content to search engine crawlers.
Baiting and switching:
To earn links to a quality piece of content, only modify that content with something more.
Trading products for links: Try to get links in exchange for free product.
Except for these techniques, there are hundreds of others. I do not have the intention to teach you the black hat SEO techniques. I just alarm you to stay away from this. Don’t even try these with a curiosity because it does not have any power left to it.
What should you do instead?
Without wasting time in the spam black hat SEO techniques, use white hat SEO.
51% of all website traffic only comes from organic search. So it’s best to stay in Google’s rules.
Try to create high-quality content and solves their problems. Before producing content try to do some keyword research. After some time the quality contents itself earns external links to your website.
Tyr to learn the on page SEO and off page SEO so that it will help you in long run. You can do this instead.
Conclusion
As you know already, the world of SEO is quite unpredictable. No one has cracked the sophisticated algorithm of Google. Moreover, Google is crafting the algorithm every day.
In this strict environment, forget about the black hat SEO and concentrate on the white hat SEO.
If you really want to grow the search traffic then stick with the evergreen on-page and off-page SEO methods. After some time you will see the hike in organic traffic.