Black hat SEO refers to any practices aimed at increasing a website’s ranking in search results that violate search engine policies. Black hat SEO attempts to manipulate search engines and send organic search traffic to low-quality or even malicious websites.
Although Google has made significant progress in fighting spam and questionable SEO tactics through its algorithms, black hat SEO continues to exist and can be effective in certain industries. However, using such tactics carries substantial risks, such as facing manual actions (penalties) or algorithmic actions if the website is detected engaging in these practices.
Black hat SEO is a gamble.
While it can work in the short run, you run the risk of building your website on a house of cards that can collapse due to a manual action or the rollout of a new spam algorithm update. If anything like this occurs, all your black hat SEO efforts will be in vain.
White hat SEO, on the other hand, is reliable and provides a cumulative benefit over time as your efforts scale and add up. Because white hat SEO is based on sound SEO principles and places user experience first, it is both safer and ultimately more effective than black hat SEO tactics.
If you’re serious about your website and expect it to grow and generate increased traffic year over year, then you should limit yourself to white-hat SEO activities.
No matter your intentions with black hat SEO, it’s important to be aware of the most prominent black hat SEO tactics out there – this helps you know which activities are best to avoid.
Black hat SEO is pretty diverse, but we’ll focus on 5 of the most common and popular black hat tactics.
Buying links is the act of paying another website owner to include a backlink to your website from one of their pages.
Because links are among the most important ranking factors for Google and because white hat link building is neither easy nor cheap, many website owners opt to skip or expedite the process of link building by simply buying links.
This can work, but only if Google doesn’t catch you. Technically, buying links is against Spam policies for Google web search.
Private blog networks (PBNs) are groups of websites created solely to link out to other websites. In other words, they pass on link equity to another site to artificially boost their domain authority and search visibility.
Further, there are both “personal” PBNs that power a black hat SEO’s own websites and also “public” PBNs that earn money on selling links (see tactic #1). While PBNs can boost your domain rating and search rankings in the short run, they can backfire as a tactic if it draws Google’s attention.
Because AI-written content is one of the top trending topics in SEO today, Google had to publish an article explaining their attitude to AI-written content.
Surprisingly, Google is not against AI-generated content if it provides value and its quality is high.
However, spam policies for Google web search have a specific section for spammy automatically-generated content. It is explained as content that’s been generated programmatically without producing anything original or adding sufficient value.
This includes any content with the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users:
Negative SEO is a set of tactics designed to sabotage a competitor’s website and damage its search rankings. This may include pointing a bunch of spammy irrelevant links to a site, scraping content so that Google views it as duplicate or stolen, or hacking into a site to make on-page changes.
As a result of a negative SEO attack, the black hat SEO would hope to see their website improve in the search rankings while other websites are penalized by Google.
While this can be a threat to your website, it’s generally not a big risk. A lot of the talk around negative SEO is being pushed by SEO software and SEO services that promise to help with negative SEO. Generally, Google is smart enough to ignore negative SEO.
Paid links and PBNs are not the only types of black hat SEO link building. There’s also:
Google wants to see natural linking from real users who find a website or webpage valuable. So, if you’re doing anything that could be construed as “unnatural linking,” you’re likely to be operating in black hat SEO territory and putting your website’s search rankings at risk.
Grey hat SEO is a combination of SEO methods that are considered white hat and black hat. It is risky because it includes many of the same tactics that black hat SEO does, though not necessarily to the same degree.
White hat SEO is the set of tactics that fall within the expectations and rules of search engines like Google. It focuses on providing high-quality and relevant content and an optimized user experience rather than relying on tricks or hacks that may exploit a search engine algorithm.
Think of white hat tactics as focusing more on delivering long-term value to actual search users, while black hat tactics focus more on manipulating search engine “loopholes” for short-term gain.
No government laws regulate SEO or the practices you must follow for your website. However, some black hat SEO tactics cross the line into illegal activity. For example, website hacking and stealing intellectual property are both illegal.
To make sure you’re not in danger of breaking the law, it’s best to avoid black hat SEO practices altogether.