What is blackhat SEO?
The term ‘blackhat SEO’ refers to any SEO techniques that help improve the search engine ranking of a page (or collection of web pages)—often quickly—but go directly against the rules of search engines such as Google.
If you want more information on this topic, check out the FAQ section below:
Question #1: Is blackhat SEO bad?
Yes, blackhat SEO is bad. It does not only go directly against the rules of search engines such as Google, it can also negatively impact your business in the long run.
Now, you may be wondering, ‘if blackhat SEO is so bad, why do some people still use it?’
Well, the appeal of blackhat SEO is that it typically works significantly faster than ethical techniques since it is specifically designed to game the system by looking for loopholes it can exploit. In addition, it is also typically cheaper and easier to execute.
Think of blackhat SEO as the get-rich-quick or get-fit-quick schemes of the SEO world. Everyone already knows that they do not work (or at least only works for a short time), but people still keep falling for them because the promise of getting stellar results fast with little to no effort is extremely difficult to resist—especially considering that the alternative almost always requires hard work, time, money, and serious patience.
Question #2: Does blackhat SEO allow me to rank higher faster?
In most cases, yes, blackhat SEO would allow you to rank higher faster. As we have seen in the previous section, this is because they are specifically designed to find loopholes in the system it can exploit to generate results much faster than methods that play by the rules.
One of the oldest examples of this would be keyword stuffing. Back when search engines were not as sophisticated as they are today, all you really had to do to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs) is to stuff your pages with the keywords you want to rank for.
In fact, you did not even have to incorporate these keywords into the content back then. You could just paste them repeatedly at the bottom of the page, make the font the same color as the background so the user cannot see them, and you are good to go.
Of course, this does not work anymore. Search engines have come a long way in terms of determining the relevance of web pages to a given keyword. In fact, using keywords more often than you should in a web page may cause it to rank lower.
Do not worry, though. There are SEO tools you can use to know exactly how many times you should use a given keyword (or set of keywords) on a page for best results.
Question #3: What are examples of blackhat SEO techniques?
Aside from keyword stuffing, other examples of blackhat SEO techniques include:
- Private blog networks (PBNs)
- Content cloaking
- Article duplication
- Comment spamming
- Link buying
Let us take a look at each one in more detail.
Also known as link farms, PBNs are networks of websites or blogs, often with high authority, that are specifically used for link building and the promotion of sponsored content. Their goal is to trick search engines into thinking that you have more backlinks that you actually do.
Content cloaking refers to the act of pulling a bait-and-switch on visitors using misleading content titles to attract visitors and trick search engines into thinking you get more visitors than you actually do.
Article duplication, as the name suggests, refers to the act of reposting an existing article with minimal changes to trick search engines into thinking that you are posting valuable, original content on a given topic more often than you actually do.
Comment spamming refers to the act of using bots to spam comments on posts found on other websites to try and build backlinks to your website.
Finally, link buying refers to the act of purchasing backlinks instead of organically building them.
Question #4: What are the risks of using blackhat SEO?
Using blackhat SEO exposes you to two primary risks:
- Having your web pages rank lower on SERPs
- Having your website completely delisted (i.e., no longer visible on SERPs)