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In the SEO world we often warn against Black Hat SEO, or the dangers of Black Hat SEO practices. So just what is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is SEO practices that are in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Google establishes webmaster guidelines for what is allowable SEO, and what kind of SEO they don’t allow. Since it’s their search engine, Google can create whatever rules they want, and if you violate their rules they can choose not to list your website in their search engine.
Ultimately, every SEO professional can be said to be in the business of manipulating search engine results — and that’s not a bad thing. Google wants to be able to find your website, and it wants to know exactly what your website is about. After all, Google’s goal is to identify what websites are more relevant to searches — that’s their business. So if you have a website about tropical fish, Google wants you to optimize your site for tropical fish related keywords.
What are Black Hat SEO practices?
Black Hat SEO practices typically involve backlink schemes, or techniques to trick search engines into thinking your site is about something different from what it’s about.
Some Black Hat SEO practices include:
- Buying backlinks, or otherwise providing monetary compensation for backlinks (including offering discounts for links, as we saw when Google punished Overstock.com).
- Creating many sites just to provide backlinks to other sites — also known as link pyramids.
- Putting hidden text on your website, including very small text stuffed with keywords, or text that is the same color as the background or otherwise invisible.
- Creating doorway pages — pages that are designed solely to attract search engine attention that then redirect users to a different website. It’s important to note that this is different from landing pages, which exist on your website and are perfectly okay.
- Using proxy servers or generating dozens or hundreds of IP addresses to make sites look like many sites, for the purposes of increasing backlinks.
- Having duplicate content stolen, or “scraped” from other sites just to make your site look like it has lots of content and updates.
There are of course many other black hat SEO techniques, and they come up with new ones about as fast as Google modifies its algorithm to eliminate the old ones. The most common black hat SEO techniques center around link building schemes, from pyramids to paying for thousands of links (which is what got JC Penney punished by Google recently).
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