What Is Black Hat SEO And Why Is It Bad For Your Website?

Black Hat SEO is essentially the opposite of White Hat SEO and was originally considered to be that kind of SEO used to cheat or break Google’s terms and conditions. Black Hat SEO is generally reported as an unethical technique to play with ranking by using loopholes in Google’s Algorithm. It uses spamming techniques so it can be harmful to the website and it uses techniques to cheat Google and rank websites higher.

Although Black Hat SEO tricks search engines and gains an unfair advantage, it hardly adds value to the website. Black Hat SEO eventually gets penalized by search engines as it damages Google’s Page Rank algorithm which determines a site’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

This blog will explain why it is bad for your website and the negative SEO effects that come from this strategy. We are sharing this information with you to ensure that the search community will have a better website shown on search results.

Avoid Penalties On Your Website

In Black Hat SEO, hackers try to manipulate the webserver, links or content to boost the search rankings of any website by using techniques like submitting spam links or PBNs (Private Blog Network) building to cheat Google’s guidelines. They are quintessentially the bad guys. It is an unethical way of increasing a website’s rankings by using loopholes in the search engine’s algorithm.

Apart from these techniques, there are also on-page optimisation techniques such as keyword stuffing, which means adding the occurrences of particular keywords unnaturally. They can also add low-quality content to their website that provides little to no value to users, it will mainly be there to influence other search engines to favour their website and get rank higher than their competitors. Black Hat SEO techniques can include hidden text or cloaking text, this method will allow you to add more targeted keywords that do not affect the appearance of the website.

20 years ago, the Black Hat SEO techniques can be very easy and effective to implement. In the first few years of search engines, they were not yet smart or practical enough to capture and penalize websites that use these tactics.

So why do lots of these techniques still influence search engines and still work in the SEO world? Fortunately, search engine algorithms have handled this manipulative and unfair technique. Google guidelines are constantly updating its own algorithms and releasing its core update to fight against Black Hat SEO tactics. The most well known and common algorithms that the search engine optimization community should know are Panda and Penguin.

Panda Algorithms

This algorithm is an update that will always filter out Black Hat SEO techniques and penalize Black hat SEO websites.

Panda Algorithm is a search engine mechanism launched in 2011 as a core ranking element of Google’s algorithm update to fight and measure Black hat SEO techniques.

Panda is considered a real-time algorithm, which can detect black hat tactics even in a short time period after its release and will affect your website ranking immediately. Black Hat SEO will cause penalties that will appear as the result of those unnatural activities.

Panda Algorithm aims to detect these tactics and penalize sites that implement their content full of spammy keywords and hidden text to manipulate their search engine rankings. This algorithm will also detect duplicates or plagiarised content from other sites since from Google’s perspective, each website should have its own unique content and be a hub of information for other users on the internet.

Penguin Algorithms

This algorithm was designed to penalize the use of website link building techniques to manipulate the algorithm to increase their search engine ranking. Black Hat SEO builds thousands of links from spam websites to easily manipulate the site’s rankings. It uses this technique to build relationships with other website owners from different niches and offer free link building, targeted links for money or paid links. It also uses illegal Spun Articles and content from somewhere else (including the plagiarism content) to manipulate a website’s rank or gather backlinks immediately.

Black Hat SEO practices often use PBNs (private blog networks) and link farm techniques to earn a huge amount of inbound links to their website and will use links that have a high page rank and good backlink profile to increase their site’s ranking. Black Hat SEO can build relationships with top-ranked websites owners, bloggers and website owners in order to get the highest quality backlinks possible. They often use automated software or bots to build links instantly on a large scale. They can create a site with the same or similar content to your website and submit these links to their directory or submit them on forums to share their link with other communities.

Black Hat SEO will use a guest blog post to build links for their sites and often ask you for money, web browser toolbar downloads, spam emails or software to build the links. They will use link farming techniques to earn high-quality backlinks for their websites and use sock puppet accounts. Black Hat SEO often register multiple sites so they can have different IP addresses to rotate their links. These are spammy ones that are banned by search engines. Black Hat practices will create a false trust in search engines such as Google to give them a better ranking position in search results and that is how penguin algorithms have been built in the first place.

Harming Your Business Reputation

Let’s say you are searching for a digital marketing agency. Obviously, you are looking for someone who is professional, trustworthy, and highly credible so you search online and find the “SEO Experts” that are ranked on the first page of Google.

But once you click on one of the websites, you find out that this website has low-quality content and insufficient useful information for you as the user. Chances are you will close this window and find another website right away. This simple scenario can demonstrate how harmful it is to have a low-quality website since this website has been built to win algorithms and get a better ranking position rather than building a website from the user’s perspective.

Even if you get a good ranking position on Google, how many users will convert into your client if you are not trustworthy in the first place? Worst of all, when Google finds out about your content, they will eventually penalize your website and you may lose everything that you worked for.

That is why we would highly recommend you avoid Black Hat techniques and follow Google’s webmaster guidelines. The best practice for us is to use high-quality content and relevant content to your business on your website and avoid adding irrelevant keywords just to win over google’s algorithms. As Google’s algorithms now are able to capture and detect keyword stuffing, unnatural links, irrelevant links, link farms, Black Hat SEO is not sustainable in the long run. Using a Black Hat SEO technique will eventually get you penalties on your website since Google’s algorithms are getting more complicated and powerful each day.

In Summary

If you are unsure about what SEO strategy you should implement on your website or if you are concerned that some of your optimisations may affect your ranking position and organic traffic, consult with us today! Contact our SEO experts today to find out what is the best practice in White Hat SEO that can be applied to your own site and business. Think ahead and avoid getting penalized by Google! Online marketing and search engine marketing is such a competitive landscape so don’t get left behind, move ahead of the competition with Move Ahead Media.