What is a Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is the use of strategies to promote a website that violates search engine rules. Black hat SEO tactics attempt to deceive search engine algorithms in order to increase a site’s ranking on the SERPs.
Search engines, such as Google and Bing, are quite clear about what types of behavior are not permitted. They’re also quite clear about the consequences of violating their guidelines.
Using black hat SEO tactics may lead to your website being penalized, resulting in lower ranking positions and, most likely, a loss in organic visits.
Why to Avoid Black Hat SEO?
Negative effect on your search results and visibility.
Black hat SEO techniques should be avoided for the main reason that they will eventually cause your website to lose traffic, visibility, and search ranks.
Won’t drive long-term results
While it may take some time for Google to identify that a site is engaging in unethical practices, once this occurs, traffic loss is inevitable.
It usually results in a bad user experience.
SEO must consider a user’s experience on a website and aim to provide the best content and UX. Black hat approaches, on the other hand, optimize for search engines rather than users. This can be problematic in and of itself.
How to Avoid Black Hat SEO?
- Cloaking– Cloaking is a strategy that includes serving alternate content or URLs to users and search engines, resulting in a unique experience for each.
- Misused structured data– While structured data can help specify entities, activities, and relationships online, abusing or misusing this form of markup is a frequent black hat tactic.
- Keyword Stuffing– Excessive use of your page’s main target keyword(s) will not help you rank. Keyword stuffing, as it is known, will almost probably have the opposite effect.
- Gateway Pages– Every piece of content on your site should serve a purpose, and you should not create pages in order to rank for keywords that aren’t totally relevant.
How to Report Black Hat SEO?
To report a website, follow the steps outlined below:
- Evaluating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
- Find the Misbehaving Web Page Address
- Choosing the Best Google Reporting Form
- Provide details on the use of black hat SEO.
- Submit your form
- Wait for Google to respond
Black Hat SEO Tools
The following are some of the most prominent SEO tools used by black hat SEOs:
- GSA Content Generator
- GSA Search Engine
- Article Forge
- SENuke
- Scrapebox
