Black hat SEO

Black hat SEO is search engine optimization that deliberately breaks Google's rules to rank higher. Black hat SEOs try to trick Google into believing their sites deserve better positions than they really do. It is a technical, often automated kind of SEO, and it is aimed at the short term: Google usually catches these techniques sooner or later and hands out a penalty.

What should you know about black hat SEO?

A good SEO professional needs to know a lot about black hat SEO. That knowledge helps you keep a site out of a penalty, or get rid of one it already has. As a webmaster it is worth reading up on the subject too. It may save you from a Google penalty.

Black hat SEO examples

Black hat sites are often built automatically by copying content from other sites and rewriting it with software. Other programs create backlinks to the site and set up social media profiles with fake followers. Until Google works out which techniques are being used, a site like that often gets plenty of visitors. With affiliate marketing, black hat SEOs can make money from it in a short time. Older techniques include cloaking (showing search engines different content than visitors), generating many automatic variations of the same page, and setting up blog networks that all link to each other.

The risks of black hat SEO

Black hat SEO is a game of cat and mouse. To do it well you need deep technical knowledge and you have to keep up with every new development. Most SEOs do not have that knowledge, and they do not need it either. The risk is that black hat techniques get your site a penalty, and getting rid of a penalty is often very hard.