Black Hat SEO is one of the very important terms that must be understood and known because it directly affects the work. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the most famous techniques in the world of electronic marketing due to its importance in the success or failure of a website in Google or Bing search engines and other search engines. They are laws and methods followed by SEO specialists, article writers and those responsible for improving your website to raise your website’s ranking to the first ranks on the search results page on Google search engines and others, but what do you know about the negative side or what is known as Black Hat SEO.
With the challenges of SEO applications in implementing search engine requirements, the Black Hat SEO method and the White Hat SEO method have emerged. When a marketer specializing in SEO decides, he must know the methods and ways to achieve Black Hat SEO and whether it is a harmful method for websites or not? What are the tools used for Black Hat SEO? Is it punishable by search engines such as Google and Bing or not? These are essential and fundamental questions that every SEO specialist and electronic marketer must know the appropriate answers to, so that he can establish a website correctly and using clean SEO techniques by following search engine policies.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is a set of practices used to increase the ranking of a website or a single page of a website in search engines using methods that violate the search engines’ terms of service and policies. The term “black hat” originated in Western movies to distinguish between “bad guys” and “good guys”; those who wore black hats were the bad guys.
Black Hat SEO is defined as an unacceptable (illegal) practice of increasing the ranking of a page or website in the search engine results pages known as Search Engine Result Page (SERP). This practice is against Google’s terms and policies and its use can lead to a website being permanently banned from appearing in the search engine and its subdomains. Because of this, Google’s Webmaster Tools and Bing’s Webmaster Tools have listed the tactics and strategies used by Black Hat SEO practitioners that are against search engine policies.
Black Hat SEO Methods:
To avoid penalties from search engines and not to harm the user experience on your site, try to focus more on White Hat SEO techniques and avoid the following black hat methods:
1. Posting low-quality content
Search engines prefer sites that have a lot of high-quality content. Since high-quality content is not easy or cheap to come by, many black hat SEO marketers try to beat the system by publishing a lot of low-quality, low-value content.
2. Keyword stuffing and duplicate content
“Keyword stuffing” is the act of using a keyword excessively in your content in an attempt to boost your search engine rankings for your target phrase. Google Analytics can tell if your keyword density is too high. “Duplicate content” is the act of posting the same content on multiple pages of a website in an attempt to attract search engines. This is against search engine guidelines and policies and can get your site penalized by search engines.
3. Cloaking
Veiling is a black hat SEO technique used to trick search engines into ranking a page on your site for a specific search term that is not contextually relevant to the page itself. Veiling displays one piece of content to users while displaying a different piece of content to search engines and has recently become more easily discoverable by search engines.
4. Use Misleading Redirects
Fake redirection is another black hat SEO trick used to mislead users and search engines by setting up a redirect link that leads users and search engines to different pages. The e-marketer uses a high-quality page to redirect visitors and search engines to a low-quality page in an attempt to boost that page’s ranking in search results.
5. Buy Backlinks
The best solution is always to get a lot of backlinks from high-quality sites (High Domain Authority) to your site. This is called Off Page SEO, which enables you to boost your site’s ranking in the search results page. However, Black Hat SEO buys backlinks instead of building high-quality backlinks over time.
6. Use Link Farms and Private Blog Networks (PBN)
Link Frames and Private Blog Networks are two other methods that Black Hat SEO marketers use to try to build backlinks quickly and illegally. In this case, the marketer uses or pays the site owner to use a network of sites that are created solely to link to sites that want to improve their site’s search ranking.
7. Spam Blog Comments
In another attempt to get backlinks to your website, the marketer comments on a lot of other blogs and places backlinks that direct the clickers to your website.
8. Misuse of Structured Data
Structured Data is added to a web page to tell search engines what rich information to display in search results pages, and black hat SEO marketers manipulate Structured Data to gain higher search engine rankings by displaying false information in search results.
9. Negative SEO or falsely reporting competitor sites
Negative SEO is used to deceive search engines and hurt competitors’ websites with the above-mentioned factors that are penalized by search engines. Thus, it makes it look like the other competitor’s website is the one using black hat SEO, or sometimes another website marketer falsely reports that your website is using methods and techniques that are against policies so that you get penalized by search engines.
8 Black Hat SEO Tools
These are some of the tools that professional Black Hat SEO marketers in the world of e-marketing use, and we do not recommend trying them at all because of their negative impact, especially in the long term:
1. Xrumer
Xrumer is a fast-working, online, Black Hat SEO program that can increase your website visitors to thousands of visits. It is a program suitable for beginners and professionals and is one of the favorite tools for many professional marketers.
2. Rankwyz
Rankwyz is usually used to build a Blog Network; it helps you manage a group of websites easily and with less effort whether they are on a dedicated hosting or a Web 2.0 hosting. This tool works great for Black Hat SEO enthusiasts to build a strong group of websites that are connected to each other.
What is Blog Network?
It is a network of sites that have a large number of links to another site (usually your own). These interconnected networks are made up of low-quality backlinks designed to deceive search engines.
3. GSA Search Engine Ranker
If you ask me which black hat SEO tool is the best to build unlimited reliable backlinks, I will definitely recommend GSA Search Engine Optimizer. In just 7 days, you will have tons of backlinks to your site.
4. Scrapebox
One of the main benefits of Scrapebox is that it can create thousands of comments on your web pages to make them look busy and interactive and also has the ability to post comments on your behalf to other sites to give you more backlinks.
5. Market Samurai
Market Samurai is not a tool specifically for black hat SEO, but it has some other features and tricks that work for black hat SEO. You can use its SERPs and great keyword research tools to cover all the competitors for your target keyword in search engines.
6. The Best Spinner
The Best Spinner is one of the most used tools for rewriting articles, and it is used if you want to send and publish your article on different sites because writing different contents in several formulations takes a lot of time. This program enables you to write articles and save a lot of time, and one of the most important features of this tool is that all articles written by this tool will be unique and new.
7. Tweet Attacks
Tweet Attacks is a great black hat SEO tool to send tweets to people who are talking about your products or services. For example – a Twitter user is talking about Asus laptops, Tweet Attacks will send them a link to your website that contains those products.
8. Traffic Booster Pro V3
Automated blogging or publishing articles is a well-known Black Hat SEO method used by professional marketers. Traffic Booster Pro V3 collects articles from websites in different languages and publishes them on your website in your website’s language, thus creating a lot of articles easily and quickly.
Consequences of using black hat seo
The use of black hat SEO methods does not go unnoticed by Google, but rather it tracks it and has issued important updates to track it, know its source, and ways to punish it. Therefore, there were many updates (algorithm), some of which are:
1. Penguin
The original update, the Penguin Update , was released in 2012, which greatly enables Google to know the number of backlinks from one site to another to determine the website’s authority (Domain Authority). Now, the Penguin’s job is to analyze sites and know how valid the number of backlinks pointing to your site are and if your site is trying to manipulate the number of backlinks. After the release of this update, more than 10% of sites in search results were affected, and some were removed from Google search results entirely. Since then, website owners and SEO professionals have been following Google’s search engine algorithm updates.
2. Panda
The Panda update is a bit different from the Penguin update, its goal is to filter search results to prevent “low-quality” content from ranking. While there is no specific definition or criteria for what constitutes “low-quality,” Google has its own course on creating valuable content, so it’s easy to see what it considers high-quality when it comes to digital content.
There’s no difference in the penalty if your website suffers a Google Penguin or Panda penalty, the penalty is the loss of your current search ranking and a significant drop in organic traffic to your site. All because of some dark tactics you may have used in an attempt to boost your website. If your site relies heavily on organic traffic, the penalty can lead to a downward spiral that could put you down forever.
Black Hat SEO Reporting Methods
There are times when it is appropriate to report a website that is going against Google’s search engine guidelines. For example, you might want to file a report if you see:
- Sites that use the methods mentioned above Black Hat SEO.
- An unwanted result that ranks high for a particular keyword.
- Another site or competitor takes some action against you that is harmful to your site’s SEO.
- Another site may have falsely reported you.
You can file a complaint through Google’s Web spam report , and also report black hat SEO tactics through Bing’s Content Removal feature. Or disavow backlinks using Google’s Disavow Backlinks tool to tell the search engine that a low-quality site is maliciously linking to your site. Read also: How to disavow malicious backlinks in the most professional way
How to protect your site from black hat SEO
If you notice that someone has started a malicious SEO campaign against your site, you can do the following:
1. Create a list of harmful backlinks
Check the backlinks to your website that have been created recently, and pick out the bad ones, so you can try to remove them. Then add tags to the bad links. You should check all the links manually to decide which ones are harming your site’s search engine ranking, and try to remove them.
2. Try to remove malicious links.
After identifying the backlinks that need to be removed, contact your webmaster and ask them to remove the malicious links. In the event that you can’t find any contact page, use Whois.Com/Whois to find a contact email address. This is about explaining black hat SEO, and we believe you don’t want to harm your site by trying to use these practices.
