If you want to rank a website then a good SEO tactic is a must for it.
But if you’re new in SEO, it might be hard for you to know which tactics you should or shouldn’t use…
For you here are some black hat SEO tactics which can harm your website rankings on SERPs.
10 Black Hat SEO Tactics
- Paid/Manipulative Backlinks
- Comment spamming
- Duplicate content
- Article sippining
- Clocking
- Doorway pages
- Keyword stuffing
- Invisible text
- Misleading Redirects
- Negative SEO
Let’s look into it in depth.
1. Paid/Manipulative Backlinks
Links are one of the most important ranking factors of Google, that’s why everyone wants to build backlinks in huge quantities.
To build backlinks peoples do some tactics such as:
- Excessive reciprocal link building
- Using tools for automated link building
- Building links on Spammy Directories and Bookmarking sites.
- Backlink on irrelevant anchor text.
These techniques are considered spammy, which build low quality backlinks. People have to do some research on link building strategies to build quality backlinks.
2. Comment Spamming
Blog commenting is a good link building strategy but many people use it in a wrong manner in which they do comment spamming on non related blogs and use irrelevant anchor text to create backlink.
Some people don’t do it manually, they use tools to sprinkle spam comments across the web.
3. Duplicate Content
Most of the people know that content is king but they don;t know what type of content is king, so they “Copy and paste” content from any website to their own.
Copy pasting of content in a single domain can be caused by the lack of knowledge or the case of neglect but, copy pasting content from one domain to other is a sign of manipulating search engine ranking which is why it is considered as the worst balck hat SEO Tactic.
4. Article Sippining
This technique is similar to the duplicate content issue. Duplicating an article is the sign of manipulation of search engines and considered as a serious offence of copyright.
5. Clocking
Clocking is a tactic in which a website provides different results on the same URLs to users and a search engine means providing a different result to each.
When a website shows these types of different results then this is a clear attempt to rank a page based on content created for search engines while showing different or unless result to the user. This is one of the major violations of search engine guidelines.
6. Doorway pages
A webpage that targets a specific keyword and contains such content which does not belong to any use of the user and act like a gateway to another page is called a doorway page.
These types of pages are against Google’s guidelines.
In this a page can be considered as a Doorway page if..
- It targets geographically targeted keywords where the business doesn’t have any physical presence and the page drives users to another page.
- The page is created to rank a particular keyword and doesn’t meet the users need.
According to all search engines, the content on a webpage has to be created for the humans, not for the search engines.
7. Keyword stuffing
Keywords are one of the important google ranking factors. And that’s why people ignore keyword density and use their targeted keyword too often in their webpages which we call keyword stuffing.
It just does not make sense whenever you read a keyword stuffed with content which creates a bad user experience and that’s why search engines consider it a balck hat SEO tactic.
8. Invisible Text
This is also like keyword stuffing but user experience is better in this. People create a webpage in which they use their keywords in white font on a white background.
By doing this, it makes keywords completely invisible to the user which doesn’t harm the user experience but the keywords are completely visible to the search engines and they can detect and index them.
This way people fool search engines and that’s why it is one of the most popular black hat SEO tactics.
9. Misleading Redirects
Redirecting is a common part of SEO when you are updating an older page to a new URL or migrating your website and it is the preferred method to ensure your site is reachable by users and search engines.
But some redirects deceive search engines and or display content to human users that is different from that made available to crawlers. This is one of the major violation of
Google webmaster guideline. And that’s why it is considered a balck hat SEO tactic.
10. Negative SEO
You might be thinking that all black hat tactics are done to rank a site. But some people do negative SEO to reduce their competitor’s ranking.
In this, what people commonly do is, they point a large number of backlinks to their competitor’s site in the hope that they get penalized because of it. But nowadays Google and other search engines are aware of that and they do better ignoring such types of links.
How to report a Black Hat SEO?
As we know Google and other search engines are improving their AI day by day to prevent such sites from ranking top in the SERPs but there are still some sites that are getting high ranking by using some black hat SEO tactics.
If you find sites doing violations like buying backlinks, spamming etc then you can file a web spam report.
We know as a Website owner, it hurts when we see that a website is getting ranked on SERP after using some unethical SEO tactics.
