What is Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO refers to a set of page optimization techniques of a website to get a better position os search results faster but questionable and reprehensible by search engine themselves.
Concretely, the purpose of applying Black Hat SEO techniques is to deceive the algorithms of search engines in order to emerge in the first results of a online search.

Black Hat SEO tactics that you should avoid

Excessive use of keywords
Excessive use of keywords (also known as keyword stuffing) is one of Black Hat SEO's main tactics. This strategy refers to the use of a particular keyword as many times as possible in a particular content, without considering the ease of reading the text or the user experience when faced with this content. The only goal is to increase the density of the chosen keyword and show relevance to search engines.

Duplicate content
Content creation is one of the main allies regarding obtaining a good positioning in search results.
However, creating an efficient content marketing strategy is now always an easy task. That's why sometimes the creation of duplicate content often arises.
This strategy is to use full content created by other authors. However, search engines algorithms can easily identify this type of situations, and end up prioritizing the older content in the results.

Hidden content
Another way to try to trick the algorithms to insert more keywords that are visible only for search engines. To this end, action like change de font size to 0 or apply the same color to the text as the background of the site might be taken. Thus, this type of content would not be visualized by visitors, but would be crawled by search engines.

Linkfarm
Linkfarms are nothing more than websites whose content are links to other pages. By this way, it is possible to create a large number of backlinks and send signals of relevant content to search engines, with the aim of getting a better position in search results.

Cloaking
Cloaking consists in the development of pages that are displayed completely differently for search engines and for users. While for the first, all techniques are used to get a better position, for the visitors are usually displayed pages with low relevance and quality.

Doorway Pages
This technique is similar to the mentioned earlier, however whenever a user accesses the page, are redirected to another page whose content is not related to what was initially searched.

Paid Links
Paid links refers to the practice of paying a particular website to create a link to your website.
Although it is one of the hardest tactics of Black Hat SEO to identify, search engines already have some tools that allows them to identify these situations, such as relation and context of websites that links to each other, or when a website starts to get a large volume of links in a short period of time.

Differences between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO
According to the techniques described earlier, it is possible to easily understand that Black Hat SEO has as its main goals to deceive the search engines only to get a good positioning in the search results, or SERP (Search Engine Result Page), instead of the usefulness that these pages can have for visitors.

In the opposite of this strategy, there is White Hat SEO. This approach seeks to put users and their experience first when they access a website's page, and provide relevant content.
The White Hat SEO strategy uses technical optimizations, such as keyword optimization, building friendly URLs or link building techniques, but always respecting the rules and guidelines provided by Google.

Why shouldn't you adopt a Black Hat SEO strategy?
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, Black Hat SEO delivers fast but poorly effective results in long term.
First, you need to think that provide online content should always have as its main focus the user. The adoption of this strategy, although it can provide a good positioning at an early stage and attract more traffic to the website, however, by not delivering useful and quality content, you will hardly be able to build a relationship with the visitors and convert them into customers of your business.

In addition, even if visitors click on the page that comes in the first results, when they come across a page with little relevance, this visitor is more likely to abandon almost immediately, thus contributing to the increase of bounce rate, which ends up negatively influence the ranking of your website.

Additionally, it is also important to take into account that although some techniques may be more difficult to identify than other, search engines (namely Google and Bing) have mechanisms that allow them to identify these unethical practices, thus applying penalties ranging from a decrease in the ranking of the results to even banning a particual page / website from the results.

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