Black Hat SEO is a set of practices used to increase the rank of a website or page in search engines through means that violate search engine terms of service. The term “black hat” originated in Western films to distinguish the “bad” from the “good”, who wore white hats. These unethical tactics don't solve the search engine's purpose and often end up in a search engine penalty. Black Hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks.
These techniques are useful for ranking, but they can lead to you being penalized for it. Duplicate content across different domains is perceived as one of the worst black hat techniques, as search engines prefer unique content. Article spinning is a technique similar to the problem of duplicate content and is becoming increasingly popular. Cloaking is another black hat technique that presents different content or URL to the user than to the search engine spider.
Keyword stuffing involves overusing the same keywords on a page to maximize its visibility and organic traffic. Google can impose a penalty if it detects that your website uses black hat SEO. Receiving a penalty from Google will trigger an update to its PageRank algorithm so that your website's ranking performance will drop or, in the worst case, the search engine will completely remove it from the list. Link farms are used to inflate the number of backlinks a particular site has, which is also considered black hat SEO.
Article spinning belongs to the notorious black hat SEO techniques and is also quite popular.So, although black hat SEO may seem like a quick way to increase traffic to your website, it is not recommended. If you incorporate SEO positioning techniques or shortcuts that go against Google's guidelines, you're compromising black hat SEO, something that any serious marketer or website owner should avoid at all costs.
Leave a Comment