What is Black Hat SEO?

There are many types of SEO and ways to do it. Some are safe to do but others actually go against Google and other search engines’ rules, otherwise known in the marketing community as black hat SEO. But what is black hat SEO?

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat seo refers to employing controversial and illegal methods for improving your website’s ranking. Typically black hat SEO methods involve tricking or manipulating the search engines in one way or another. Consequently, if the search engine catches on to what you’re doing, it can result in your website dropping in the rankings or being de-indexed altogether so that it’s no longer able to be found in that particular search engine at all.

This is in contrast to white hat SEO which involves using perfectly acceptable and encouraged methods by the search engines for affecting your rankings.

“Gray hat SEO” also exists as a middle ground between white and black hat techniques and while it’s not quite as illegal as black hat, it’s still frowned upon and can get your site punished.

Examples of Black Hat SEO

Keyword/Anchor Text Stuffing – One of the most classic black hat seo methods which involves filling your page with your targeted keyword in order to convince search engines that your web site is an authority on that topic. This hasn’t worked in over a decade.

Artificial Link Building – Using automated link builders, buying links, getting links from link farms are all unnatural ways to get links and can get you in trouble, not to mention they typically don’t actually give you any real link juice. Even something like link exchanges which is more in the gray hat area of the spectrum can get you in trouble if you do enough of it to irk the search engines sufficiently. A couple dozen link exchanges isn’t bad to get you started, several hundred is another story.

Cloaking – Delivering different pages to the user and the search engine crawlers in order to provide seemingly high quality content to the crawler but something completely different to the user.

Hidden Links/Text – Using hidden text or links is similar to cloaking in that you’re delivering a different product to the user than you are to the search engines.

Doorway/Jump/Gateway Pages – Using multiple pages as entrances to your main site, each which are optimized for different keywords which then redirect to the main page. These pages have no real content on them.

Examples of White Hat SEO

White hat SEO examples are more conventional when it comes to developing your website. Natural link building, sharing your link juice with other sites, growing your presence on social networks, using your keywords in the title/meta tags and using synonyms to that keyword in your article and creating good content in general are all perfectly acceptable and effective methods of white hat SEO.

I talk a lot more about how to go about SEO in my “No Nonsense Marketing/Making Money Online Handbook” which you can download for free by signing up for my “10 Day Fast Track Training Course” for affiliates looking to make serious money. You can sign up in the box at the top right of this page for free and download the eBook immediately; OR if you’re asking why you should sign up in the first place, here’s why.

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