What is Black Hat SEO? by Best Digital Marketing Agency, Absolute Digital
Updated: Oct 20, 2020
Black Hat SEO are methods used to increases a website's rank on Google through unethical means that go against Google's terms of service. Black Hat SEO is most commonly defined as a disapproved practise that could increase a page's ranking in a search engine result page (SERP). These practices are against the search engine's terms of service and can result in the website being banned from the search engine. Black hat techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks amongst other guidelines set by Google's Webmaster.
Black hat SEO goes against the guidelines set by search engines and manipulates them to gain higher rankings. Using this method can lead to being banned completely from Google or gaining a much lower ranking. While White Hat SEO is the ethical way of ranking on Google's SERP by creating relevant and quality content for good user experience.
Why Black Hat SEO?
Although unethical, many businesses and digital marketing agencies still practise black hat SEO. The reason for this is simple - white hat SEO usually takes a long time (6 to 9 months or more) to even find your website on Google. To rank on page 1 of Google takes a huge amount of time and effort to generate relevant content for your website and requires strategic keyword planning.
Whilst black hat SEO is like a shortcut to trick Google into believing that your website is credible and relevant. However, once Google's algorithm finds out that you have breached their guidelines, your website will be blacklisted and banned from their SERP.
In short, black hat SEO is fast and effective (at the start). However, if you want sustained growth and to stay on page 1 of Google, you will need proper SEO techniques such as white hat SEO methodology.
Repercussions of Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO can harm your business in many ways:
Lower search rankings or disappear from search results entirely. Because black hat SEO method goes against Google's terms of service, they will penalize and even ban your website from their SERPs.
Only short-term results. Because black hat methods exploit their guideline's loopholes, the results earned through the methods will disappear once the loophole is fixed in one of Google's frequent updates. This happens regularly, as Google is constantly looking for and fixing loopholes that people use to game the system.
It creates poor, irrelevant, or misleading content. Many black hat tactics create a poor user experience, which can cause users to leave a page, creating a high bounce rate for your website. It can also make a brand look spammy and untrustworthy.
If you want to gain long-term search visibility and build trust with users, avoid black hat SEO. To stay on Google's page 1 results page, you should stick with the sustainable best practices for SEO - White hat SEO.
How to identify Black Hat SEO?
Here are some common techniques used by black hat SEO. When your digital marketing expert is using one of these methods, you can identify that they are using black hat SEO and should request for a cease immediately before causing more harm than good to your website.
These techniques are:
Low-Quality Content - Unoriginal content copied from other websites or content not relevant to the website.
Spam - Keyword stuffing or duplicate content to create content volume.
Cloaking - Showing different sets of content for users and search engines to trick search engines into ranking content for a specific search term that isn’t tied to the context of your website.
Unethical Backlink Building - Creating fake, irrelevant, or buying backlinks from spammy websites to trick Google.
Proper SEO
Creating original, value-added content is the best way to rank on Google with white hat SEO. If you'd want to avoid harming your website and learn how to effectively rank your website on Google page 1, you can learn more about proper SEO techniques. Alternatively, you may contact us at +65 8892 1290 or drop us an email at hello@absolutedigital.sg
