What Is Black Hat SEO?

Date First Published: 4th October 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

Black Hat SEO Techniques

Learn more about what black hat SEO is in this article.

Black hat SEO, also known as spamdexing, search engine spam, or search engine poisoning, is the practice of artificially manipulating the ranking of pages in the search results page to drive traffic to low-quality or irrelevant pages that have little value for users. Black hat SEO is unethical and prohibited by search engines. Websites that get caught engaging in spamdexing will get penalised, meaning that they will appear lower, or even be completely removed from the search results page. Black hat SEO is designed for pages to be indexed by search engines in a way that satisfies the website owner, but dissatisfies the search engine providers and searchers.

It is highly recommended to avoid black hat SEO techniques and finding ways to artificially manipulate the search engine ranking of a page. These unethical techniques often have the opposite effect. Focusing on publishing high-quality content on a regular basis that people will want to share will encourage other websites and users to link to it, boosting the ranking, and this will cause the content to spread to a much wider audience once it ranks higher in the search engine results. Black hat SEO is the opposite of white hat SEO, which refers to a range of long-term ethical techniques used to improve search engine rankings in a way that abides by the search engine guidelines and involves no deception.

Black Hat SEO Techniques

All of these techniques below are black hat SEO techniques used to unethically gain higher rankings on search engines in a way that violates the guidelines and rules of search engines. Examples of black hat SEO techniques are:

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the act of placing an unnecessarily large amount of repeated keywords onto a page to artificially manipulate the ranking of that page. This may be accomplished by repeating words so that they sound unnatural, adding keywords that are irrelevant to the topic of the page, repeating keywords that are hidden from a visitor but visible to a search engine (e.g. making the text the exact same colour as the webpage background so that it is unreadable by users but readable by search engine bots), and repeating paragraphs of text elsewhere on the page. The content is often of low quality and creates a bad user experience.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages, also known as gateway pages, are webpages that are stuffed with keywords in order to trick search engines into thinking that it has high-quality content when it actually has content of little value for users. They are called doorway pages because they provide extra doorways into a website without providing any unique content to the user.

Page swapping

Page swapping is the act of completely changing a page after it has been ranked and indexed by search engines. Webmasters will use certain content to rank high and once satisfied with the ranking, they will swap the page content with something else that won't rank as high in the hope that search engine bots won't discover that the content has changed. Page swapping deceives users as the description and title are completely different to what the page is actually about. Eventually, search engine bots will return to the page, notice that it has been changed, and then reposition the page in the SERP page, so this is a short-term black hat SEO technique that only works for a limited span of time.

Hidden or invisible text

This is when webmasters place text on a page that can be read by search engine bots, but not users. An example of hidden text would be making the text the same colour as the background colour.

Link schemes

Link schemes, also known as link farms, are a type of link building that artificially boosts the ranking of webpages through manipulation of the number of backlinks pointing to those pages. This is because the number of external links pointing to a page is one of the main factors that search engines use to rank pages in the SERP page. Most search engines are aware of and can detect artificial links pointing to a website.

Cloaking

Cloaking is the act of presenting different content to search engines than users. in order to manipulate the ranking of a website for certain keywords on the SERP page. This is often accomplished by delivering content based on the IP address or the user-agent HTTP header of the user requesting a page. For example, a page may have something that specifically checks for a user agent of a search engine bot, such as Googlebot or the bot's IP address to show different content to the bot than the users. When they are identified, a different version of the webpage may be delivered, often one that is not present on the visible page.