Black Hat SEO is the term given to SEO techniques that are manipulative, deceptive, illegal or in violation of a search engine’s guidelines. They are in contrast to White Hat SEO techniques, which are above-board and used by all professional marketers.
The objective of Black Hat SEO is to rank webpages higher in search engine results pages. Unfortunately, when they’re spotted, they are penalised with demotion or even removal from SERPs altogether.
These are many examples of Black Hat SEO techniques, such as:
- Setting up or using a Link Farm
- Generating automated or scraped content
- Keyword stuffing
- Blog comment spam and other spam messaging
- Adding invisible keywords to a webpage
All of these Black Hat techniques can be automatically spotted by Google’s algorithms and are penalised when they are detected.
