Black Hat SEO: What Do You Need to Know?

The temptation to give in to the sirens of Black Hat SEO is sometimes great for e-merchants and SEOs who pursue ambitious goals. If the results can be achieved - at least on an ad hoc basis - adopting this type of strategy is not without risk. Discover this concept, its methods, its advantages and the dangers it involves.

The Concept of Black Hat SEO

The guidelines issued by Google, the engine responsible for most of the organic web traffic in Europe, are at the origin of this expression. Webmarketers who tend to fully respect these famous “ Guidelines”Are considered professionals in the White Hat, examples to which we oppose people who break the rules and share a common point: their objective is above all to please the engines in order to see the pages of their site climb in the rankings. An exhaustive tutorial, presenting unique content, naturally shared on social networks and on forums, is the illustration of a White Hat work generally valued by the engine. Conversely, a sloppy subject, which only partially responds to the problem of an Internet user and which was created only to generate a backlink to another site, is the typical approach that deplores and penalizes Google. However, there are a multitude of situations which do not correspond to these two frameworks. 

Let us quote for example a too long loading of pages related to the absence of caching or to the acquisition of many never optimized links which do not risk penalizing the site to which they point but will not improve its popularity either. In addition, it is obvious to stigmatize a technique which is of no interest as such for an Internet user, like the low quality pages of a blog network. However, if it allows an attractive online store to overtake an e-commerce site which was above all at the top of the results thanks to an aggressive netlinking, should we be moved by it? The end justifies the means… some webmasters probably say to themselves.

Black Hat SEO: Methods and Their Benefits

The Contents

The publication of texts intended only to improve the positioning of a site is one of the actions acclaimed by supporters of Black Hat SEO. This is for example spinned content which is substantially similar to each other and does not provide any added value since a single version generally makes it possible to respond to the request made by the user of a search engine. 

The creation of a network of sites powered by Splog associates texts of mediocre quality with netlinking which has no real interest for the Net surfer. The stuffing of keywords and the duplication of contents (likely to be copied on another site) are among the techniques easy to implement. The first no longer has any impact, the second can work in some cases as we will discuss below.

Technical Parameters

To try to fool the engines in order to improve the organic visibility of its site, webmasters implement cloaking. It is a question of presenting for a single and same page two distinct contents, according to the targeted target. A first version is revealed to search engine robots, often over-optimized and stuffed with keywords relating to the activity we practice, a second version is offered to Internet users. 

The abusive use of redirects is also one of the technical possibilities requested by webmasters to manipulate the results of Google and other engines. In particular, it is possible to transfer popularity while preserving its main site (the one through which conversions are carried out) with the 301 redirect.

The Links

From the neophyte to the passionate autodidact via the creative developer: the acquisition of links in order to artificially increase the popularity of a site interests very different audiences. If getting backlinks to blogs already heavily used by spam does not help improve positioning, the discovery of “spots” (places) where to place a contextualized link on an address whose Metrics stand out positively (Trust flow in particular) can radically impact visibility on engines. Even if the backlink in question - for example being on a forum or a high-profile social network (such as a .gov extension) - ultimately only serves to generate popularity and thus constitutes a Black Hat action. 

To identify advantageous locations, the followers of this practice use for example a tool such as Scrapebox. Even without this software, the use of fingerprints gives the opportunity to find host sites for your future links. To locate blogs accepting comments, we distinguish this command:

Negative SEO & Advanced Techniques

We could have made it only a sub-part of the previous paragraph. But we wanted to give more importance to Negative SEO which certainly feeds on the concept that is the subject of this article. Often called the NSEO, it consists in carrying out actions with the aim of harming the NSEO of a competitor. 

Mechanically, we can gain positions and even directly increase our visibility with one of the advanced techniques that we will discuss. Link poisoning has already affected many platforms and will undoubtedly be responsible for further upheavals in the SERPs in the future. It is hardly useless to create thousands of toxic links to give a competitor site a negative image with Google, the latter having already assimilated this method and does not penalize the platform which undergoes the attack. On the other hand, it is rather obvious to commit considerable damage by increasing the popularity of the competitor “targeted” with thousands of quality links, then making them disappear abruptly. 

Another unsavory technique: stealing well-positioned content from a competitor and taking ownership of it by taking advantage of canonical tags. Did you also know that it was still possible to inject a Meta NoIndex tag into blogs or shops with failing security, causing content to be deindexed? Among other approaches that may be used, there is a completely legal form of denunciation which consists in identifying on a website licensed content (wordpress theme and images for example) which have been pirated and alerting their creators. Without recommending them, we encourage you to inform you about all these processes in order to protect you from possible attacks.

The Risks of Becoming Black Hat SEO

Types of Penalties

As indicated in the first part of our article, the line between tolerated and prohibited practices is frequently drawn. In addition, as the rules of Google change rapidly, actions that were not wrong for a decade can suddenly be penalized. The more you embrace the Black Hat SEO approach, the more you run the risk of seeing your site (or those of your clients) being sanctioned one day or another. We distinguish on the one hand the so-called automatic penalties, on the other hand the manual penalties. The two filters Panda and Penguin allow, according to Google, to generate more relevant search results and are similar to automatic penalties. The first disadvantages addresses that are characterized by low quality content, the second has been integrated into the algorithm to fight against unnatural link profiles. 

As such, the creation of pages with low added value, published only to maximize the number of contents in the index, may be sanctioned. It is also difficult to go under the radar when you suddenly get a lot of links whose anchors are systematically over-optimized, that is to say containing keywords related to the activity of the site. Manual penalties imposed by members of the Google Search Quality Team are reported in the Google Search Console tool. It is also difficult to go under the radar when you suddenly get a lot of links whose anchors are systematically over-optimized, that is to say containing keywords related to the activity of the site. 

Manual penalties imposed by members of the Google Search Quality Team are reported in the Google Search Console tool. It is also difficult to go under the radar when you suddenly get a large number of links whose anchors are systematically over-optimized, that is to say containing keywords related to the activity of the site. Manual penalties imposed by members of the Google Search Quality Team are reported in the Google Search Console tool.

What Penalties For The Offenders?

Both your business and that of your customers can be significantly affected by these penalties. In the best case, it is about a decline of the pages concerned in the engine, one speaks then about downgrading. If you convert to a large extent with just a few requests, this type of sanction can have dramatic consequences on your bottom line. Do you have duplicate content? They risk disappearing altogether from search results, this is indexing. The most serious penalty is embodied by the blacklisting of the website.

A sanction which is not definitive but which often requires specific actions to be considered again as “frequentable” by the dominant engine. If you fear the worst, complete the command without the quotation mark “site: yourdomainname.com”, an address belonging to the blacklist does not appear during this search. By adopting procedures relating to Natural SEO, you also run the risk of being attacked by competitors. And if you have implemented advanced techniques including pirating, legal sanctions cannot be ruled out.

It's hard to advise you to adopt a particular approach, it's up to you to judge the risks and determine if the game is worth it. You have to be humble and keep in mind that a practice can work well for a while and be penalized afterwards. 

If we had to give you a recommendation as a metaphor, it was about not putting all your eggs in one basket. In other words, the platforms whose audience does not depend mainly on natural results are certainly those with the brightest future.