14 Black Hat SEO Tricks To Avoid

Black hat SEO, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s a general term that covers everything that’s considered unethical or “cheating” to get your site ranked in the number one spots in the search engines. In the short term many of these tricks do work at getting your site the number 1 spot, in the long term however your site will be penalized, pushed down in search engine rankings, or your domain may be completely abandoned by them. And if your website is about trying to make money, or is part of a business this can have a serious impact.

So how do you know what’s considered black hat seo if you’re brand new to the whole website or blogging game? Here is a list of 14 black hat seo tricks to avoid.

1. Hidden Text

Hidden text is a very old black hat seo trick. Keywords are stuffed onto a page and placed in the background; those keywords are then made the same color as the background color to make them invisible to human visitors. However the bots that crawl your site can still see them. In the past this was used a lot to get pages to rank in the number 1 spot, and is still used a lot today by those who are new to websites or SEO and think they can trick the search engines. What they fail to realize is that Google’s algorithm is getting smarter all the time and can spot this very easily and will penalize your site.

2. Cloaking

Cloaking is used to display one website to visitors and another to the spiders. One of the most common ways of doing this is using the I-frame redirect code. This way your website visitors will see an affiliate website, but the search engines will only see your website and not the affiliate.

3. Doorway Pages

Once upon a time doorway pages like many black hat seo tricks were considered white hat until they were abused worse then a red headed step child by website and their dog. A doorway page is essentially having your website optimized for a group of keywords, but it redirects all of its traffic to another website once it’s indexed.

4. Google Bombing

This can also be considered a link wheel. Google bombing is where you have your main website that you want to rank in the number 1 spot with. To get it there you create lots of “mini sites” that link to your main website as a way of building one way back links to that site and artificially boost its popularity.

This doesn’t man however that you can’t create other sites or things such as articles, hub pages, or other blogs to link to your website and in fact many websites do. But when a website goes from having 0 to thousands of links overnight it looks unnatural and will be penalized.

5. Duplicate sites

Another old black hat seo trick is to create duplicate sites. This is where you take an existing website or blog (it can be your own, or be someone else’s website) take its source code and make a few simple changes to it. They modify such things as the sites title tags, Meta tags, description, keywords, or change a little bit of the content by rearranging it. Once the changes are made they get it indexed on Google and the search engines.

Again Google is always getting better at spotting black hat seo tricks and has the ability to match sites. If it sees a duplicate site, that duplicate will be banned.

6. Automated submission and link building software

How many times have you seen advertisements promising thousands of links if you buy or use their automated software? You need to avoid these for two major reasons.

1. Most of these are a scam to separate you from your money and either don’t work or will submit your site to crap links with no page rank and to sites that nobody visits.

2. Google and the other search engines hate these and will penalize your site if you use them.

What Google wants is real relevant links that have been built naturally.

7. Keyword stuffing

Another old black hat seo trick is to stuff you’re with as many keywords as you can think off. A long time ago you could do this and rank well for each of them. But like other black hat seo techniques this was abused, not to mention Meta tags don’t hold the same power they once did. You should use no more then 4 to 6 keywords in your Meta tag, otherwise it’ll be considered stuffed and your site will be penalized.

8. Paid link

Some site owners will approach the owner of another website that ranks better then theirs and actually pay them to have them to have a link placed on their site. This shouldn’t be confused with advertising web space on your site that companies pay a monthly fee to display their advertisements. This is one site owner going to another. Personally I think this is less a black hat trick then just plain stupid and wasteful. Yes Google will penalize you if they find out, though the chances are slim. But you don’t need to pay another site owner for a back link, unless of course you have money to burn.

9. Link farming

There are tonnes of sites out there that promise to get your website thousands of other websites to link back to yours automatically. They have a number of different ways of going about this, from getting credits from browsing other sites listed with them, to paying money. Either way these are bad and should be avoided like the plague. Google won’t see these links as being valid, or worse see them as bad neighboured sites and will consider your site in the same category as theirs.

10. Scraping

With the countless number of websites, blogs, videos, and everything else on the internet these days it’s almost impossible to have something that’s 100 percent original. That being said scraping or essentially copying and pasting somebody else’s content is a huge no no. Your content should always be written in your own words or if copied from another site, done so with their permission and the appropriate links back to their site.

11. Auto generated content

Anything automated is never good for your site and the same applies to this. This is essentially software you can download or buy that takes another websites content you copied, and makes some minor word changes to make it appear as if it’s brand new content. Get caught doing this and I guarantee your site will be banned.

12. Keywords that don’t match your content

Your keywords are essentially your address for people to find your website. Many try to trick visitors by either using keywords that have nothing to do with their content or by using the same keywords over and over on different pages of their site in an attempt to put more importance on it. Each page of your site should have its own keywords that aren’t repeated. Besides why use the same keyword twice when there are unlimited keyword combinations to rank for.

13. Title stacking

This is when you use more then one title per page in the title tags of your website (<title> and </title> if your not sure what that looks like) in an attempt to have that page rank high in search results. Don’t do this, its stupid plain and simple.

14. Link to spam sites

What are spam sites? These are all the gambling, porn, and junk websites that are choking the internet. Also considered bad neighbourhood sites these are websites you want to avoid linking to at all costs. Linking to them even if your site is legit with your own content and follows all the rules will put you in the same niche as them by default, guilty by association basically and will treat you the same as them.

If you want your website to rank well and stay ranked well for the long term then stick with white hat seo as much as you can otherwise your just pissing away any chance your website has.