What Is Black Hat SEO and Why Should You Avoid It?

When it comes to website rankings, 90.63% of pages do not get organic search traffic from Google. There are many simple changes that you can make to improve your page rankings. However, some companies participate in strategies that fall under black hat SEO, which can lead to more problems in the future. Do you want to learn more about black hat SEO and why you shouldn’t use these principles when making changes to your website?

Keep reading this article to see why you should always use SEO best practices!

What is Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO is a practice that goes against the guidelines set by search engines. They are used as a way to increase rankings without doing the work to improve a website’s organic SEO.

Rather than focusing on the users, people who use black hat SEO cheat the system using dishonest practices.

Some business owners look at black hat SEO as a shortcut to get better rankings and more visibility. While these may temporarily work, Google will penalize your website for these practices which will hurt your SEO more than it will help it.

It is never a good idea for a website to use black hat SEO. Instead, websites should use white hat SEO practices, that follow search engine guidelines and that will not be penalized by Google or other search engines.

Risks of Using Black Hat SEO

Because black hat SEO is an unscrupulous method to increase your rankings, Google punishes any websites that use these practices.

First, black hat SEO can cause your rankings to drop and may even result in your site disappearing from search results. This is because you are using techniques that go against the terms of service that are set by search engines.

Next, black hat SEO only creates short-term results or may not even provide results at all. Black hat SEO finds loopholes in search engine guidelines that allow them to increase their rankings.

However, search engines are constantly changing and improving, meaning these loopholes will be fixed and you will no longer see these results.

Finally, black hat SEO is risky because it provides poor experiences for users on your website. When users have bad experiences and leave your site, this can lead to lower rankings and it may make your brand look unreputable.

Because black hat SEO is so risky, it is not worth using these practices to improve your search engine optimization. Instead, you can focus on using white hat SEO practices or you can hire an SEO agency to help you improve your website with high-quality SEO.

Types of Black Hat Practices & How to Avoid Them

There are many common types of black hat practices that use loopholes to improve search engine optimization. These are quick fixes that will not provide lasting results if they provide results at all.

Here are some of the most common black hat marketing techniques and how you can avoid them on your website.

Frequently Publishing Low-Quality Content

One common technique is to frequently publish low-quality content. Search engines often recommend regularly posting high-quality content. However, it can be difficult to create good content that will rank naturally.

Instead, black hat SEO publishes low-quality, cheap content that does not offer any value to users on the website. Similarly, black hat SEO may duplicate content and post the same information on multiple pages of a website.

To avoid this problem, you need to spend time creating content that is unique from your competitors and that is valuable for your users. Rather than buying cheap content from low-quality websites, you can hire a content creator to write blog posts and other website content for you.

Keyword Stuffing & Duplicate Content

Another common black hat practice is known as keyword stuffing. While keywords are necessary to improve your rankings, using the same keyword excessively to try to rank for the term looks spammy and unnatural.

Typically, it is recommended that you have one primary keyword and a few secondary keywords in your article. Only include these keywords when necessary and where they sound natural, otherwise, the keyword density will be too high.

To make sure your content doesn’t use keyword stuffing, you should read your paragraphs aloud to see if they make sense or to see if they sound disjointed.

You can also run a scan for duplicate content on your website to be sure this is not affecting your rankings.

Buying Backlinks

Next, black hat SEO techniques include buying backlinks. Backlinks are important for search engine optimization, as it shows your website provides value to other users.

However, they are hard to earn. To save time, black hat marketers try to buy backlinks to boost their rankings rather than earning them organically.

While it takes longer to earn backlinks, spending a few hours a week looking for potential backlinks will help you improve your rankings without using black hat methods.

Hidden Text

Finally, hidden text is a black hat SEO practice that uses text that is the same color as the background of your website. This is often used as a keyword stuffing method that cannot be seen by your users.

However, search engine crawlers are able to detect this text and will identify this practice as keyword stuffing. Never use hidden text on your website, as it will make your brand seem deceptive and dishonest.

Get Help Improving Search Engine Rankings Today

While it may seem tempting to manipulate your search engine rankings with black hat SEO practices, this will result in Google penalizing black hat practices. It is important that you avoid each of these common types of black hat tactics to ensure you are improving search engine rankings naturally.

One way that you can do this is by hiring an SEO agency like Bipper Media to help. Our team knows each SEO best practice to follow and will avoid using these quick tricks that may lower your rankings even more.

Contact our team today for a free SEO strategy session to see how you can increase your rankings!