What Is Black Hat SEO? (2024)

Black hat SEO refers to techniques used to boost a website’s ranking on search engines in a manner that goes against search engine guidelines. The term “black hat” is a nod to old western movies where the villain is commonly seen wearing a black hat and the hero a white one. In this dichotomy of bad versus good, the villain acts only in self-interest, often to the detriment of those around them.

Similarly, black hat SEO exploits the search engine algorithm with the sole intention of increasing a website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs), sacrificing a good user experience in the process.

These practices go against the true spirit of SEO, which is to gain search engine rankings by creating useful and relevant content. Search engines have publicly identified and denounced black hat SEO tactics over the years in official documents such as Google’s Search Essentials and Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines. Web developers and website owners can turn to these resources to avoid using the wrong SEO strategies.

When you search for a keyword or phrase in a search engine, the engine uses algorithms to show you the most relevant content based on your query. Once people discovered that this algorithmic process could be gamed, black hat SEO was born. While algorithms have matured over time, people can still employ many of these tactics because they exploit the fundamental nature of a search engine.

Take, for instance, the common practice of keyword stuffing. This tactic involves repeating popular keywords in as many places as possible on a website in order to rank highly for those topics. This method may work because search engines look for relevant keywords to rank websites in the SERPs. An offending site may get away with keyword stuffing for a short while, but today’s search engines use algorithms that will eventually recognize and penalize this kind of behavior.

Black hat SEO exploits search engine algorithms to gain rankings in a manner that goes against search engine guidelines. With black hat SEO, websites might see rapid gains in SERP rankings, but search engine penalties can quickly reduce these. Black hat SEO is seen as unethical as it creates a worse user experience for people who need relevant search results when using a search engine.

Conversely, white hat SEO follows search engine guidelines and focuses on the quality of the content from the reader’s perspective. This means providing original material that enriches the user experience with information relevant to the original search query. White hat SEO is a more long-term approach to gaining engine ranking. It is also considered the ethical and correct way to optimize a site.

Search engines want to be useful tools that users can rely on—black hat SEO obstructs this goal. Thus, search engines will administer harsh penalties to keep bad actors off of SERPs. Consider the following risks that come with black hat SEO.

Manual Actions

When a human reviewer determines that content on a page or site is not compliant with their engine’s guidelines, they respond with what is known as manual actions. Manual actions include lowering the ranking of pages or sites and—in some cases—completely removing them from search results without any visual signal to the user.

Algorithmic Penalty

Search engine algorithms are updated regularly to keep up with contemporary black hat SEO. When the algorithm recognizes black hat SEO, it can respond automatically by demoting the rank of offending sites. Additionally, the algorithm can also promote the rank of higher-quality content, which in turn organically demotes spam-like content that is of lower value.

You should always avoid black hat SEO techniques as they can result in penalties that include your site being omitted from search results. Here are five common black hat SEO techniques you should know about so you can avoid using them.

Hidden Text

This technique involves hiding text on a page so it’s not visible to users but visible to the search engine. An example would be using a gray background and writing keywords all over the page in the same gray background color so the words blend in and are invisible to users. Avoid using hidden text, as it is easy to pick up by search engines and will result in penalties.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a practice that displays different content depending on who’s looking at it. The most common cloaking method is showing images to human users while only showing HTML text to the search engine. Search engines disapprove of this tactic because it allows users to be bombarded by unwanted content, such as ads or malware, when they are expecting something else. Normally, search engines can warn users about potentially malicious sites, but cloaking bypasses these precautions. When a search engine detects cloaking, it penalizes the page.

Private Blog Networks (PBNs) a.k.a. Web Rings

PBNs, also known as web rings, work on the premise that having external links from other websites benefits search engine rankings. But in this scenario, you own all the websites and link them to each other. By linking to each other, the sites are able to push each other into higher search rankings. While this can be a legitimate method for users who own multiple sites, it becomes problematic when the sites are all the same and only serve to channel traffic between each other.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing takes advantage of how search engine algorithms scan pages for keywords relevant to the searcher’s query. It involves arbitrarily repeating keywords throughout a website’s content for phrases or topics that you want to rank highly for. The result is usually a website that is poorly written or is useless to anyone looking for real, relevant information. Search engines are designed to recognize keyword stuffing, and it brings no value to your users. Not to mention, keywords are not the only thing search engines look for to rank a page highly, so you’re only going to get so far with keywords.

Blog Comment Spam

One of the oldest black hat SEO methods is adding links to your sites in the comments sections of someone else’s blog as another form of creating backlinks to your content. Since this method is so well known, most websites will just mark your comment as spam and ban you. Additionally, if you use this method, your brand might appear amateur or illegitimate to users who see you spamming your links in comments.

While black hat SEO might garner quick gains in search engine rankings, it comes with the risk of harsh penalties for breaking search engine guidelines. For this reason, black hat SEO is never worth implementing over its white hat counterpart. Creating useful and compelling content builds trust with your user base that will translate into more sustainable, long-term success. Remember to stay educated on search engine webmaster guidelines so you can keep black hat SEO out of your content.