Black hats are nothing more than malicious hackers with criminal intent. In the SEO field, this term is used for all those who use unorthodox techniques for search engine rankings.
The black hat is a hacker.
The term black hat originated from cinema, specifically from critic Roger Ebert. The black hat, was always worn by the bad guys, which was always contrasted with a white hat, which was the one worn by the good guy.
The black hat/white hat metaphor has since been taken up in the IT field and, in recent years, has also been applied to SEO Strategy.
Black hat SEO
I black hat SEOs are people who are experts in ranking websites on search engines, using techniques that are not very lawful and disregard guidelines, with the aim of climbing the SERPs.
Below is a list of the main techniques considered black hat.
Keyword stuffing
With keyword stuffing refers to the distorted and thoughtless increase in the frequency of keywords within a text, with the hope of increasing the chance of ranking for those particular keywords.
Hidden text and links
Some black hats use text of the same color as the page background and hidden links, present and not visible, to improve their SERP rankings.
Cloaking
That is, pages created specifically for search engines that are different from those seen by users. Simply put, when a spider is identified within the site, a script shows it a different version of the web page.
Desert scraping
A technique of taking content that is no longer indexed by Google and reusing it on one’s own pages.
Spam links
Use software and/or automated link exchange circuits to increase your popularity.
Doorway or gateway pages
Pages without content created for the mere purpose of being indexed by search engines to push other pages. Useless to users as they contain no information whatsoever.
Black hat SEO: conclusions
Doing this type of SEO is absolutely not recommended.
Although you may get SEO ranking results in the immediate term, you should know that Google tends to penalize these techniques, effectively rendering the work useless.
It is always good to remember that search engines are very careful about cybersecurity, and rather inflexible in the face of black hat SEO.
Attempting to hack Google’s computer systems, can mean serious consequences. Such as removal from the Google index.
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