People that practice black hat SEO could care less about what Google wants or states is best practice. They have one singular goal of manipulating the SERP to position their content at the top. And they’ll do so regardless of this risk.
Surprisingly enough, there are still plenty of black hat SEO consultants who pretend to be white hat SEOs. Keep this in mind if you ever interview SEO consultants. With SEO, it is buyer beware. Know your SEO and know your SEO’s tactics well before you hire a potential consultant.
While black hat SEO tactics can help a website or blog rise quickly in search, the results will be short-term. Soon enough the search engines will take note and the web property will be penalized or removed completely from the search engine’s index.
Black Hat SEO Tactics
- Thin content that offers no real value to website visitors
- Keyword stuffing and using irrelevant words
- Hidden text or links
- Cloaking or redirects
- Publishing multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with virtually the same content
- Using doorway pages
- Forced interlinking or link farms
- Buying inbound links in an effort to distort search engine rankings
Google specifically describes what they consider being illicit practices or black hat SEO, so it is very easy to avoid such tactics. You can visit Google to learn more about each one of those black hat practices.
For some quick links to help you learn more about Google’s view of black hat SEO, visit 2.5 Learn about search engine optimization and Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Black hat SEO techniques can lead to a website being removed entirely from a search engine’s listings or index. Or in other words, your website is penalized and it may be removed entirely from Google, thus not being available for search traffic.
Your first line of defense is education. More you dive fully into SEO, make sure you are educated and you have a clear understanding of what SEO is and what is acceptable.