SEO Glossary > Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO


Black Hat SEO is the use of manipulative or deceptive practices to achieve a higher rank in search engines. Participating in link schemes, generating automatic content, and placing hidden text or links on web pages are a few examples of disapproved practices by Google. Websites that practice black hat SEO techniques can be automatically demoted by algorithms such as Penguin or can have manual action taken against them by the search engine's quality team. Google and Bing have specified [certain practices] as being black hat.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Bing Webmaster Guidelines


What are some black hat SEO tactics?

 

Some examples of black hat SEO techniques are:
  • Cloaking, which is the practice of showing different content to the search engines than the user. The goal of cloaking is to rank content for irrelevant terms. It can also be used to avoid web bots from finding spam content that is being served to users.
  • Publishing low-quality content that is scraped from another site either by a bot or by a person.
  • Adding invisible keywords to a page. This is done by making the text the same color as the background.
  • Keyword stuffing, which refers to the practice of repeating keywords often in an unnatural way.
  • Misusing structured data by providing inaccurate information in order to fool users and search engines.
  • Blog comment spam, which is a practice by which a person will add links pointing to their web page to blog comments.
  • Private blog networks or PBNs, which are authoritative websites used solely for link building. The goal of a PBN is to inflate the number of links pointing to a site.

How do I report black hat SEO to Google?

 

Sites that engage in black hat SEO practices can be reported to Google by filing a complaint through Google's webspam report.

black hat