SEO – Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO means using tricks to fool search engines and to get a higher ranking, against their guidelines. Google calls many of them spam and has a public list of spam policies. These methods may work for a short time, but the risk is high.

Black hat techniques you must avoid

Technique	What it is
Keyword stuffing	Repeating keywords again and again, in the text, tags or in a hidden way
Hidden text and links	Text in the same color as the background, or placed out of the screen
Cloaking	Showing one page to the search engine and another page to users
Sneaky redirects	Sending users to a different page than the one the search engine saw
Doorway pages	Many similar pages made only to rank for slightly different searches, which all lead to the same place
Link schemes	Buying links, link exchange on a big scale, link farms, private blog networks
Scraped and spun content	Copying the content of other websites, or changing words with software
Scaled content abuse	Making many pages with automation or AI mainly to get search traffic, with little value
Comment and forum spam	Posting links in comments or forums without being useful
Expired domain abuse	Buying an old domain to host a poor quality content and use the old reputation
Site reputation abuse	Hosting third party low value content on a trusted site only to use its ranking power
Fake reviews	Writing or buying reviews which are not real

What can happen to your site?

• Algorithmic demotion: the ranking systems lower the pages automatically. You get no message, only a drop in traffic.
• Manual action: a human reviewer at Google finds a violation, and the page or the full site can be demoted or removed from the results. You can see this in the Manual actions report of Google Search Console.
• Loss of trust and money: recovery can take many months.

If your site was hit

1. Check Search Console for a manual action message.
2. Find and remove the problem: spam content, bought links, hidden text and similar.
3. For a manual action, send a reconsideration request and explain what you fixed.
4. Keep improving the quality. Recovery from an algorithmic drop needs time.

Negative SEO

Sometimes competitors send spam links to a site to harm it. Google says that its systems are good at ignoring such links. Watch your Links report, and use the disavow tool only if there is a real problem. See Backlinks.

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