Black Hat SEO refers to the unethical measures or disapproved and risky practices adopted to aggressively highlight and rank a webpage. The aim of black hat is same as White Hat SEO i.e. to garner maximum online traffic due to higher rankings however the measures adopted do not necessarily focus toward human audience rather are more oriented towards search engine algorithms. These techniques and tactics can although generate the required results and were once considered legitimate web development techniques, are generally short lived and websites employing black hatting always trigger the risk of getting blacklisted or banned by the search engines. Getting banned / excluded in SERP results in loss of the most viable, sustainable and sure source of online traffic to a webpage.
What constitutes as Black Hat SEO?
Various aggressive techniques are employed in black hat SEO designed to manipulate with the SERP algorithms that can involve ‘Link Farming’, ‘Link Buying’ and ‘Link Exchange’ whereby SEO optimizers resort to generating fake, unrelated or repetitive backlinks, links redirecting to google and unrelated sites or links leading to negative SEO campaign against a competitor, spamdexing, unnecessary and over utilization of keywords and phrases known as ‘Keyword Stuffing’, entire page replacement after ranking has been carried out i.e. ‘Cloaking’, inserting hidden or out of sight text, keywords and / or links, creating multiple pages within a website with duplicate content or copying content form some other site, creating ‘Doorway Pages’ which lead visitors to an unnecessary page before leading to the real website or are created for the benefit of ‘crawlers’ only thus giving search engine the impression of linked-up pages etc. “Webmaster Guidelines” provided by the search engines like Google, Bing etc. provide parameters of SEO as a reference to all web development experts.
Why avoid Black Hat SEO?
Search engines are constantly upgrading their algorithms with innovative techniques and therefore ‘Black Hat SEO’ always has the potential to trigger search engine’s algorithms toward its disregard of guidelines (terms of service) and web manipulation. As a result, this technique is generally only employed by organizations that want short term yet heavy return on their investments like spams, online fraud etc. and they do not consider getting banned, backlist or penalized as a viable or considerable risk. However, for a long-term business, loss or even decrease of online traffic can result in loss of potential revenue and as such it should be avoided. In general, any of the Black Hat SEO techniques lower the user experience and as a result repeat visits are minimal while negative popularity gradually rises.
The sole purpose of SEO is to optimize your webpage to get higher ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) so that greater online traffic can be attracted. Where ‘White Hat SEO’ techniques can propel you in this direction, ‘Black Hat SEO’ can have huge negative connotations; the severest being getting banned / blacklisted by the search engines. In today’s contemporary competitive world where hundreds of millions of users come through search engines each day; would it be really beneficial to get Backlisted?
