Black Hat SEO Techniques
A list of top 10 black hat SEO techniques are given below:
- Keyword Stuffing
- Cloaking
- Hidden Text
- Doorway Pages
- Article Spinning
- Duplicate Content
- Page Swapping
- Link Farms
- URL Hijacking
- Improper Use of Snippets
1) Keyword Stuffing
Search engine analyses the keywords and key phrases on the webpages to index the websites. To exploit this feature of search engine, some SEO practitioners increase keyword density to get a higher ranking, which is considered a black hat SEO technique. A keyword density between two to four percent is considered optimal, increasing keyword density beyond that will irritate your readers and affect your ranking.
2) Cloaking
It refers to coding webpages in such a way that search engines see one set of content, and visitors see another set of content, i.e., a user searching for “gold price” clicks on a search result “current gold price” and is greeted with a travel and tourism site. This practice is not in accordance with the search engines’ guidelines, which say to create content for users not for the search engines.
3) Hidden Text
The text which search engines can view but readers can’t is known as hidden text. This technique is used to incorporate irrelevant keywords and hide text or links to increase keyword density or improve internal link structure. Some of the ways to hide text are to set the font size to zero, use CSS to set text off-screen, create white text on a white background, etc.
4) Doorway Pages
The poorly written pages which are rich in keywords but don’t contain relevant information and focus on the links to redirect users to an unrelated page are called doorway pages. These pages are used by black hat SEO professionals to pass on user traffic to unrelated sites.
5) Article Spinning
It involves rewriting a single article to produce its different copies in such a way that each copy looks like a new article. The content of such articles is repetitive, poorly written, and has low value for the visitors. In this technique, such articles are regularly uploaded to create the illusion of fresh articles.
6) Duplicate Content
The content copied from a website to publish it on another website as the original content is known as a duplicate content. This black hat technique is known as plagiarism.
7) Page Swapping (Bait-and-Switch)
In this technique, first, you get the webpage indexed and ranked on Search Engine listings, then you change the content of the page entirely. In this case, the user is diverted to a different page when they click on a result in the SERP.
8) Link Farms
A link farm is a website or collection of websites intended to increase the link popularity of a site by increasing the number of incoming links. It is considered black hat seo as links farms’ sites have low quality and irrelevant content.
9) URL Hijacking (Typosquatting)
Here, a domain name that is a misspelled version of a popular website or a competitor’s site is registered in an attempt to mislead the visitors. For example, whitehouse.com may mislead users who want to visit whitehouse.gov.
10) Improper Use of Snippets
In this black hat seo technique, the snippets which are not relevant to your site or page are used to drive traffic to a website. For example, using a review snippet even when your page does have a single review.
