To remain the most popular search engine in the world, Google must constantly update its algorithms to continue to provide useful results to users.
To this end, Google has also launched Google Search Essentials so that everyone from web developers to SEO professionals understand the rules of the game.
Of course, there are also many people who want to win the game without following the rules.
The tactics they use are known as black hat SEO.
Black hat SEO gets its name from old cowboy movies where the bad guys wore black hats.
Black hat SEO practitioners understand the rules of SEO and use that understanding to take shortcuts that are not explicitly stated in Google’s best practices.
This is in stark contrast to white hat SEO practitioners who promote high-value content and conduct in-depth keyword research to win in the SERPs.
Google is good at identifying and penalizing black hat SEO techniques, but this doesn’t stop people from trying them. As technology develops, new techniques are constantly invented, which prompts Google to increase its crackdown on black hat SEO.
Here are 13 black hat practices to avoid as they could earn you an algorithmic or manual penalty.
There are some things you could be doing unintentionally, so it’s best to familiarize yourself with black hat SEO to make sure you’re on track.
Black Hat Linking Techniques
1. Purchase link
High-quality, relevant links drive traffic to your domain while telling the Google algorithm that you are a trustworthy source.
Good backlinks also help Google map your site, allowing it to better understand your website and make it easier to feature you as a search result.
However, buying links violates the main point of Google's search, and - according to Google - it doesn't work.
If caught, you could be hit with automatic and manual penalties, affecting specific pages or, even worse, your entire site.
Google keeps track of links that may be purchased and links that have already been acquired.
Additionally, you don’t want to buy links from a site that’s selling you links, because it’s much easier for Google to identify unnatural patterns than you think — even on Google’s own properties.
For this reason, Google has created a form to help you disavow links .
This way, when you browse backlinks, you can get rid of any bad domains.
2. Performance-based navigation
PBNs are websites that link to each other.
They were very popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, especially among fan pages for TV shows, movies, musicians, etc.
When it is intended to manipulate the algorithm, it is seen as a linking scheme, and with current advances in artificial intelligence, search engines can capture this pattern perfectly.
3. Spam comments
You may be able to share a link to your website in the comments section of the website, but you should avoid doing so unless it is relevant.
Otherwise, you may be penalized for being a spammer, as using comments for link building is inherently ineffective.
4. Footer Links
The footer is prime space for links because it appears on every website page.
If you add footer links with commercial anchor text on a large scale to manipulate results, Google may identify these links and penalize you .
5. Hide Links
You might think you can hide links within the text of your site, or make them appear the same color as the background, but Google will notice and penalize you for trying to trick the system.
Additionally, if you include enough irrelevant links, Google will have no reason to direct traffic to your target audience because you’ll be diluting your relevance.
Deceptive hidden links violate Google's guidelines . This means:
- There is no text hidden behind the image.
- Don't use CSS or JavaScript to keep text off-screen.
- Do not use a font size of 0.
- Do not make a small character such as a period, link.
Content Black Hat Techniques
6. AI generates content at scale
With the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s easier than ever for chatbots to generate large amounts of content.
Google has updated its guidelines to address the large-scale use of AI-generated content, recommending that it be thoroughly reviewed and fact-checked to ensure accuracy and reliability.
This means that using AI to mass-generate content without human supervision violates Google's guidelines.
However, black hat SEO experts in the early days of AI took advantage of these techniques to create large amounts of content without proper human supervision.
So when Google updated its algorithm and detected the AI-generated spammy patterns, many of these sites were removed from the search results.
Here are some cases where Google has penalized people for AI-generated spam.
7. Article Spinning and Scraping Content
Article spin is a technique that rewrites content by replacing synonyms, changing sentence structure, or completely rewriting the text while conveying the same message as the source material.
Article spinning or scraping can be done manually, but modern techniques often use artificial intelligence and sophisticated software to make it harder to detect.
For good reason, articles like this lower the quality of the internet, which is why Google penalizes you.
8. Disguise
Cloaking is an old black hat trick that is still used today - using flash or animated pages to hide information from visitors so that only Google can see it in the HTML.
It is very difficult to mislead Google without being detected. Google uses data from Google Chrome, which means it can see what is rendered on the user's page and compare it to what it crawls.
If Google finds out that you are hiding your identity , you will be penalized.
9. Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are a form of hidden identity.
They are designed to rank for specific keywords and then redirect visitors to other pages.
They are also known as:
- Bridge page.
- Portal page.
- Jump to page.
- Gateway page.
- Entry page.
10. Capture search results and simulate clicks
Scraping search results or using robots to access Google Search for the purpose of checking rankings is a violation of their spam policy .
This is usually done in conjunction with article scraping, where an automated script scrapes Google searches to find the top 10 articles and automatically rotates them.
Another type of spam is to write a robot program that visits Google and clicks on search results in order to manipulate click-through rates.
Their goal is to mislead search engines into thinking certain pages are more popular or relevant than they actually are. This manipulation can temporarily boost a site’s perceived engagement metrics, but it’s a serious violation of Google’s guidelines.
11. Hidden Content
Similar to hidden links, hidden content is content that is set to the same color as the background or moved out of the user's screen view using CSS techniques.
This is a strategy that aims to include as many keyword phrases, long-tail keywords, and semantic linking words as possible on the page.
Of course, Google’s algorithm can differentiate between keywords in the body of a paragraph and keywords hidden in the background.
Besides being placed intentionally by the site owner, hidden content can find its way onto your site in a number of ways.
- You can publish a guest post from someone that contains hidden content.
- Your commenting system may not be rigorous enough to detect hidden content.
- Your website can get hacked and the hackers can publish hidden content. This is also known as parasite hosting.
- Authorized users may accidentally place hidden content because they copy and paste text with CSS styles from a different source.
Not all hidden content (such as accordions or tabs) is prohibited.
The rule of thumb is that as long as the content is visible to both users and search engines, the content is OK.
An example might be content that is only visible to mobile visitors but is hidden from desktop visitors.
12. Keyword Stuffing
If SEO was just about using keywords, then one set of keywords would be enough to rank first.
However, since Google wants to provide high-quality results, it is looking for content that is rich in semantically linked keywords.
This way, the algorithm is more likely to serve up high-quality content, rather than content that simply bears the superficial label of high-quality content.
13. Rich snippet spam
Rich snippets are snippets on SERP pages that contain more information. Enhanced visibility can increase click-through rates on your site on SERPs and drive more traffic.
However, the schema used to generate these snippets can be manipulated in many ways. In fact, Google has an entire support page dedicated to this .
However, if you receive a manual action for misusing structured data , it will not affect your site’s ranking . Instead, it will remove all rich snippets for your site from the SERPs.
in conclusion
The rewards of black hat approaches are short-lived. They are also unethical because they make the Internet worse.
But you can’t do the right thing if you don’t know how to do the wrong thing, which is why every white hat SEO also needs to understand the black hat path.
This way, you know how to avoid it.
If you get penalized unexpectedly or decide to change your practices, there are ways to get rid of a Google penalty.
These are just a few of the many black hat techniques that can lead to your website being de-indexed in the Google search engine. A good practice is to follow the quality guidelines of the webmaster tools and avoid any short-term ranking schemes. On various Internet marketing forums, you will find some tips and tricks to improve your website's ranking, and unfortunately, they do work in the short term. However, after a while, your efforts will be in vain because the Google search complex algorithm will identify any such black hat SEO techniques and push your website into the black hole.
What other black hat SEO techniques do you recommend others avoid? Have you ever been penalized for using bad SEO techniques on your blog? Please share your experience with us in the comments.
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