As opposed to "white hat" SEO - which follows the best practices established by Google and other search engines - black hat tactics are designed to work much faster, but at the ultimate cost of your website ranking and credibility with your target customers. The following five methods are the most common in the black hat playbook. Whether you naively thought they were standard practice or have just been trying to see what you can get away with, here's the breakdown. But first things first.
Why is black hat controversial?
The main differentiator between white hat and black hat SEO is that the former provides content that's useful and relevant to what members of your target audience are looking for, while the latter manipulates content to achieve the single goal of search engine page ranking. "This means misleading both the humans and the algorithms," McGovern writes.
Keyword stuffing
- Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value.
- Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for.
- Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural, for example:
We sell custom cigar humidors. Our custom cigar humidors are handmade. If you're thinking of buying a custom cigar humidor, please contact our custom cigar humidor specialists at custom.cigar.humidors@example.com.
Invisible text and links
"Hiding links and text for the sole purpose of building links comes in different sizes and shapes," writes Razvan Gavrilas , founder and chief architect of cognitiveSEO . Like keyword stuffing, this practice has been around a long time. Again, Google covers this topic in detail in its Quality guidelines , which we provide verbatim:
- Using white text on a white background
- Locating text behind an image
- Using CSS to position text off-screen
- Setting the font size to 0
- Hiding a link by only linking one small character - for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph
When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?
Paid links
Ironically, businesses selling links can easily be found on Google. So just because you can find Google ads on Google offering "quality backlinks," doesn't mean they're legit.
Copied content
A blog post for API company Twinword defines copied content as follows:
"Copying content from other sites and posting it on yours as the 'original' is plagiarism and Google identifies it quickly. And once Google's consistently crawling spiders find the duplicate content, it de-indexes them immediately.
"Moreover, there are many plagiarism detectors available on the internet that can check whether your content is plagiarized or not. Most of them also provide the exact source from where particular information has been copied."
Clickbait
Speaking of low-quality content, clickbait is everybody's favorite source of cheap laughs. Now a popular meme, the classic clickbait headline typically ends with "Number 5 Will Shock You!"
Clickbait headlines are over-promising and/or sensationalist statements that entice visitors to click through to the linked piece of content. Although intriguing, the headlines often turn out to be misleading and deceptive once visitors realize they've been directed to unrelated, unrealistic or false webpage content. As Twinword states, clickbait is a black hat SEO technique because it deceives users for the purpose of increasing a website's click-through rate (CTR).
While clickbait occasionally offers some odd entertainment value, savvy web surfers immediately recognize it as a waste of time. Do you want them thinking the same of your website - and, by extension, your business?
Beware of blurred lines
Between black hat and white hat, there lies gray hat - SEO techniques that are sort of "iffy." Writing for Search Engine Journal , SEO consultant Helen Pollitt offers an interesting perspective on the difference among the three.
For example, on the issue of content quality, white hat requires content to be written to aid user navigation, answer questions and otherwise provide value to the visitor. Black hat content exists solely for the search engines. Gray hat content, however, according to Pollitt, "... is written purely for the purpose of ranking the page well. It contains just enough keywords to drive visitors to the page but doesn't really add much value.
"The page would be just as useful to the visitor without the text but ranks better with it ... Is it in the spirit of the guidelines or does it go against them?"
While it's good to be aware of the gray areas, we advise not attempting this yourself. You need to know the rules very well before you can bend them without breaking them. It's not worth incurring Google's wrath to err on the dark side.
The take-home message and our blatant self-promotion
As you've seen, it can be hard for a business owner going it alone to determine which SEO practices are best, and which are best avoided. But you can't stray far from the righteous path if you keep your target customer first in mind and provide content that's relevant and helpful across the board.
Fortunately, you don't have to navigate the complexities of SEO on your own! Virtual Stacks Systems specializes in SEO services and all the elements that integrate to ensure seamless optimization - such as website design and website redesign , social media marketing and pay-per-click marketing .
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