Black Hat SEO is a set of practices used to increase the rank of a website or page in search engines that violate the terms of service. The term “black hat” originated in Western films to distinguish the “bad” from the “good”, who wore white hats. These unethical tactics don't solve the search engine's purpose and often end up in a search engine penalty. Black Hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks.
These techniques are useful for ranking, but they can lead to you being penalized for it. Duplicate content across different domains is perceived as one of the worst black hat techniques, as search engines prefer unique content. Article spinning is a technique similar to duplicate content and is becoming increasingly popular. This is higher-level plagiarism and involves the use of special software that takes the copied source and reformulates it for later use as a “new” and unique publication.
Cloaking is another black hat technique that presents completely different content or URL to the user than to the search engine spider. This method of SEO is considered misleading because it tricks search engines to get the desired rank target keywords. Keyword stuffing involves overusing the same keywords on a page to maximize its visibility and organic traffic. Black Hat SEO also includes manipulating SERPs (search engine results page) to get rankings, which can lead to sanctions from Google, being removed from search engines, or seeing metrics drop completely.
It is important to implement a canonical tag to indicate the original version of your article, so other copies are invisible to Google robots. White Hat SEO focuses on using ethical and fair techniques to improve the quality and visibility of a website and ensure that it performs well on search engines. Other white hat SEO techniques include offering quality products or services, using descriptive and keyword-rich titles, optimizing images, creating internal links, and more.
