I was recently with an entrepreneur who spoke about black hat SEO. Years ago he was rapidly scalling his tech business and turned to a competitors’ agency to support his SEO. Everything was going brilliantly for two years and then, traffic not only fell of the cliff, it drowned in the sea below.
The business was victim to black hat SEO.
What Is Black Hat SEO
Google remains the world’s most popular search engine because it continuously updates its algorithm to deliver users the most useful, high-quality results. To keep everyone on the same page, Google publishes its Google Search Essentials, setting the rules for web developers and SEO professionals.
However, plenty of people still try to game the system.
The tactics used by those trying to “win” without following the rules are known as Black Hat SEO.
The name comes from old Western films where the villains wore black hats. Black Hat SEO practitioners understand the rules of search engine optimisation but choose to take shortcuts that violate Google’s best practices. This is in direct contrast to White Hat SEO, which focuses on promoting high-value content and engaging in deep keyword research to earn top spots on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
While Black Hat techniques promise quick wins, they are a significant gamble. Google is exceptionally good at identifying and penalising these tactics. Adopting them can result in severe algorithmic or manual penalties, negatively impacting your visibility and traffic.
It’s vital to familiarise yourself with these practices – even White Hat practitioners can accidentally stray into a penalised zone.
Here are some of the major Black Hat practices your business must avoid.
Black Hat Link Techniques
A high-quality, relevant backlink tells Google you’re a trustworthy source, but manipulating this signal is a red flag.
Buying Links
This is a direct violation of Google’s Search Essentials. Google can track unnatural linking patterns. If caught, you risk an automatic or manual penalty that could affect specific pages or your entire domain. Buying links often connects your site to low-quality or spammy domains, making recovery difficult.
Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
These are webs of interlinked websites designed solely to manipulate search algorithms by creating artificial backlinks. Current AI advancements make it easy for search engines to identify and penalise these schemes.
Comment Spam
Sharing irrelevant links in website comment sections to build links is ineffective and risks a spammer penalty. Links should only be shared when genuinely relevant to the conversation.
Footer Links at Scale
Placing commercial anchor text links in the footer across many pages is considered an attempt to manipulate results due to the footer appearing on every page. Google can easily identify and penalise this misuse.
Hidden Links
Attempting to hide a link. For example, by making the link text the same color as the background, using a font size of 0, or hiding it behind an image. This is an obvious attempt to game the system. Deceptively hidden links are a clear violation of Google’s guidelines.
Content Black Hat Techniques
These tactics focus on manipulating page content or keyword usage to achieve rankings without offering real value.
AI-Generated Content At Scale Without Oversight
While Google permits the use of AI, mass-generating content without thorough human review and fact-checking violates their guidelines. Early Black Hat pros who exploited this by creating huge volumes of unsupervised content saw their sites vanish from search results when Google updated its spam-detection algorithms.
Article Spinning and Scraped Content
Article spinning is re-writing content by substituting synonyms or changing sentence structure to replicate the source material. Scraping is simply lifting content from other sites. Both degrade the quality of the internet and will be penalised by Google.
Cloaking
This is an old trick where you show one set of information to visitors (like a flash or animated page) and entirely different, keyword-stuffed content to search engine bots (via the HTML). Google can easily detect this discrepancy and issue a penalty.
Doorway Pages
Also known as bridge or gateway pages, these are designed to rank well for specific keywords but immediately redirect visitors to a different target page. This manipulative tactic aims to funnel traffic and is heavily penalised.
Scraping Search Results and Click Simulation
Using automated bots to scrape Google Search results for rank-checking (often paired with article scraping) or to click on search results to artificially manipulate click-through rates (CTR) is a violation of Google’s spam policies.
Hidden Content
Similar to hidden links, this involves making text the same colour as the background or moving it off-screen to stuff as many keywords onto the page as possible. Google’s algorithm can tell the difference between visible, useful content and hidden keywords.
Keyword Stuffing
This is the practice of excessively loading a webpage with keywords or keyword phrases in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking. Google prioritises content rich in semantically linked keywords that provide real value, not blocks of repetitive phrases.
Short-Lived Successes and Unethical
The rewards of the Black Hat path are short-lived and unethical. They degrade the quality of the internet experience for everyone.
Every successful marketer knows that you can’t do something right without knowing how to do it wrong. Understanding Black Hat SEO is crucial so you can actively steer clear of these risky tactics. Focus instead on providing high-quality content and a great user experience. This is the only sustainable path to success in search.
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About Me
If you enjoy my blogs, you might be curious about my background. I’ve worked in PR and Marketing since 1993. In 1999, I founded a full-service agency and spent the next 24 years successfully growing it. I had the privilege of partnering with some of the biggest blue-chip brands in the UK and learned extensively from the exceptional marketing professionals I met along the way. In 2023, the management team I built successfully acquired my agency, 8848, setting me free to pursue new passions.
My love of marketing and communications now powers our own family venture: a retreat of holiday cottages in the Peak District. I love making brands look and work better, and in just a few short years, we’ve driven significant growth. Thanks to my focus on SEO, we consistently rank on page one for most key regional search terms, making 2025 our busiest year yet.
Do you need help making your brand or business perform better? If so, I’d love to meet you.