Black Hat SEO: What It Is, Why It's Dangerous, and How To Avoid It

As a small-and-midsize-business leader, you may never use black hat SEO purposely. However, some of your website pages may have content that could get you flagged and de-ranked by search engines.

Perhaps you hired an SEO company or analyst, and they threw in some invisible keywords or used page-swapping techniques to boost your rankings sooner, get paid, and move on to the next client. Additionally, your site may be older and have some SEO tactics embedded that are now considered black hat.

Regardless of why black hat SEO techniques were used, they are dangerous and can significantly impact your search engine ranking. Here's more on what black hat SEO is, why you need to avoid it, and how you can do so.

Black hat SEO involves deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes to improve rankings in search engine result pages.

As creating content according to the searchers' needs can be expensive, some marketers deliberately include content that search engines could misinterpret as ‘helpful.’

For example, a common black hat SEO technique involves ‘invisible text.’ In this technique, the web page designer includes hidden keywords that are not visible to the reader. These keywords are placed to match the searchers’ intent, fooling the search engine to consider the content as valuable.

This helps black hat designers save time as they don't have to create relevant content according to users' needs. With advancements in algorithms, search engines can now detect invisible text and may penalize your page, reducing its search engine rankings.

You can hire an SEO company to eliminate black hat SEO and use white hat SEO to rank higher in search results. 

As the opposite of black hat, white hat SEO involves creating high-quality content that organically meets search engine requirements. By using genuinely helpful white hat instead of black hat SEO, you can give users what they want, boosting your brand perception and increasing the number of visitors you convert into paying customers.

Black hat SEO is dangerous because it can hurt your website's search engine performance and business. Here are some negative impacts of using black hat SEO:

• Search engine penalization: When a search engine detects black hat SEO tactics on a page, it can penalize the page, drop its search rankings, or deindex it. This may involve completely removing it from search engine results.

• Business losses: While you may be able to attract visitors using black hat techniques, including ‘invisible text,’ they might feel deceived when they don’t find relevant content on the web page. If users don’t find your content helpful, you may lose their trust, impacting your business’s conversion rate.

• Reputational damage: Besides losing visitors, a page with black hat SEO embedded can affect a business’s reputation, making it look disingenuous or hacky to potential customers and others in your industry. This can cast a negative shadow over your business, impacting your reputation in the industry.

• Legal complications: Some types of black hat SEO, such as copying existing content or cloaking, can lead to legal problems, resulting in expensive litigation and time-consuming court battles.

Once you’ve discovered that your website is impacted due to black hat SEO, you should make some changes to initiate recovery from penalties. To start appearing in results, you should:

• Create relevant content that aligns with search engine ranking requirements and uses white hat SEO techniques.

• Get other sites to link to yours to improve your helpfulness score in search engines. This will help search engines assess your website to be an authoritative and reliable resource.

• Once you’ve revised your web pages using the latest white hat SEO techniques, you should wait for a considerable time to witness the results in page rankings. The duration may vary for each web page, depending on its content and the other pages you're competing against.

Following black hat SEO techniques may have been successful for a short time, but search engines can now detect them and penalize your page in response.

Content automation

Content automation involves using software or programming to create content automatically without much human intervention. Such content lacks a human touch, often making it less relatable and valuable for visitors. Content automation differs from artificial intelligence-generated content, which search engines, including Google and Bing, don't currently penalize.

Doorway pages

A doorway page is one stuffed with content, such as keywords and images, that are supposed to fool search engines into giving the page a higher rank. When the targeted visitors click on the page, they are sent to another page the black hat designer wants them to visit.

For example, suppose a marketer were to use black hat marketing for a business that designs computer processors. They may stuff keywords like "how microchips are designed," "fastest processors for Linux," and "best processors in [X city]" all over a doorway page. Next, they can set up the page to automatically forward visitors to the business's products page when they click the link in the search engine results.

Hidden text or links

As mentioned above, adding hidden text to your web page makes the text invisible to readers. Typically, the hidden text consists of keywords the black hat designer thinks search engines are looking for. It can also consist of links to reputable websites, discussion forums, or other sites that have been put there to trick search engines into thinking the page is trustworthy.

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing involves throwing in keywords—either one or several—unnaturally into a page's content in the hope that a search engine won't notice. For example, earlier people wrote entire paragraphs with keywords separated by commas. Some people put the same keyword in one sentence after the next. Now, search engines can detect keyword stuffing and drop your page in their rankings for unnatural stuffing in the content.

Cloaking

With cloaking, a black hat designer shows users one page but presents another to the web crawlers search engines use. To do this, black hat designers enable a website to recognize when a search engine crawler, such as Googlebot, is sending a request to view the page. The site then serves the crawler an SEO-optimized version of the page, with keywords and other elements the search engine may use to rank the page higher. However, when a regular visitor clicks on a link to the page types in its URL, they’ll see content designed for them—content the search engine may not rank as high.

Link schemes

In a link scheme, the website owner or designer tries to boost their site's page ranking by buying links or embedding links designed to manipulate search engines. For example, someone may purchase backlinks to a site that Google may consider authoritative. Instead of linking to the buyer's site because it has genuinely helpful content, the seller links to some of the buyer's content only because the buyer paid them.

Hidden redirects

A hidden redirect involves a webpage sending users to a URL different from the one they selected on the results page. In many cases, the page they get sent to has malware, ads, or other harmful or annoying content. Hackers use hidden redirects to sabotage a site's reputation or steal its visitors.

Negative SEO

With a negative SEO technique, an attacker puts black hat-style content on a competitor's site. If a hacker can access a page's code, they could paste some invisible text to drop the page in search engine rankings. This technique allows hackers to eliminate competition without spending much time and resources.

To avoid black hat SEO, you should:

• Hire reputable web designers: Designers who can present client testimonials and reviews are known for maintaining a great market reputation. Hence, they are more likely to avoid using black hat SEO to boost your website’s rankings. 

• Purchase templates from respected sites: Respected website template providers may remove templates with black hat content, helping to avoid negative reviews and legal issues.

• Inspect your site: You should look for content stuffed with irrelevant keywords, random or unhelpful content, or spammy links to low-quality sites. Consistent checks on your website’s backend will help you avoid black hat SEO attacks.

How can I recover from black hat SEO penalties?

To recover from a black hat SEO penalty, you have to clean up your site by removing any black hat content and bad backlinks. This will improve your website’s performance, allowing search engines to crawl your page easily.

This can take days to months, depending on why your site got penalized. However, the impact of the previously imposed penalty will eventually reduce and no longer impact your search engine rankings. With the right content, even the strictest search engine algorithm can consider your site legitimate and helpful and improve rankings accordingly.

What are some ethical SEO practices?

There are many ethical SEO practices that search engines reward with high rankings. Some of these include:

• Creating content that provides good, thorough answers to users' queries about a keyword.

• Getting authoritative, relevant, and trustworthy sites to link to your site.

• Using images that help explain or illustrate your site's content.

• Enhancing your website’s content’s scannability by ensuring smooth readability and avoiding lengthy paragraphs.

To create a successful SEO strategy, you should first set up your site’s goals, such as increasing sales or ranking for specific keywords. 

Next, you want to research keywords with high search volume to target the most effective terms for your products or services.

Once you have a list of your target keywords, you should create and publish content that would be helpful to your target audience. After you post a new piece, use SEO analysis software to see how your fresh content may impact your site's SEO.

If you are doing your website SEO yourself, you can use SEO software to systematically examine older content and figure out what you need to refresh, remove, or replace to remain high in search engine rankings.

With the above-mentioned techniques, you can ensure your website’s safety from black hat SEO. Using SEO analysis tools can help you quickly identify and remove harmful content and links and start getting your page closer to where you want it to be in search results.

Your next step is improving your SEO by ensuring you have the right content for higher rankings.