What is Black Hat SEO?

bySeanGreentre

3K followers

6 years ago

I often get asked about black hat Search Engine Optimisation, and more specifically, what it actually is. Firstly, this is not an article telling you how to do black hat SEO, but moreover telling you why you want to avoid it.

So let's start by defining what SEO is. What most SEO consultants carry out when they go through the search engine optimisation process is what we refer to as ethical or white hat search optimisation. We're trying to help Google and other search engines understand what our websites are all about, and in doing so get better search rankings.

Black hat SEO is all about manipulating the search engines in order to try and fool them into giving you better search rankings.

So, how do you define what is black hat and what's white hat, and where is the barrier between the two. Well, Google have a set of webmaster guidelines that's basically a set of guidelines that tells you what you should and shouldn't do. And if you break those guidelines, that will be seen as black hat by Google. So let me give you an example.

One that Google quite recently and openly spoke about should hopefully make it very clear. BMW, the car manufacturer in Germany, a number of years ago were using a web agency, and that agency carried out some black hat techniques. So fundamentally what they did is that when you came through to the BMW website as a user, you would see the website as normal. But when the search engine spiders - the Google software that reads your website and sends the information it sees back to Google - came through to read the BMW website, they were shown a different version of the website, and that version basically repeated several relevant keywords again and again. Now, instead of this helping them getting to the top the search engine rankings, what actually happened is Google noticed this. I should mention that Google has a whole team of quality engineers looking at these kind of things, as well as many automated systems looking too. Google, having identified this approach, went ahead and made sure that BMW in Germany was removed from Google - so not just taken down the search rankings, but removed completely. As you can imagine, if you get your company banned from Google you will not be particularly popular.

So what happened at BMW? Well fundamentally it wasn't great for BMW obviously. There were some staff changes and the agency they were using was changed too. But this situation also wasn't great for Google either because users couldn't find BMW - because the reality was that people were searching for it, not finding it, and so it made Google look stupid too - especially being a really significant and large website. But Google were contacted by BMW and the situation was explained. They had to then go through and resubmit themselves to Google. Once they'd changed things and assured Google that they weren't going to do this again going forwards, they were then resubmitted into the Google index and then they started to show up again.

So as you can see if you're working with an agency and you don't know what they're doing, you need to be very clear on the fact they're not using these kind of black hat techniques. And fundamentally, what Google sees should be exactly the same as what the user sees.

So there's a couple of ways you can make sure you're not pushing the boundaries or doing anything that you shouldn't be doing. First of all, there are the Google webmaster guidelines - you can go through and download those and it will take you through step by step what you should and shouldn't be doing and what Google is looking for from your site. There's also lots of good SEO advice in there as well to help you optimise your website.

The other thing you should have set up is the Googlr Search Console - previously known as Google Webmaster Tools. This is a handy tool - referred to in the lessons here at Wealthy Affiliate - that tells you if Google is having any problems accessing your website's content. It will also let you know if there is a problem with their spiders reading your content, as well as letting you know if you're doing anything dubious. And if you do have an issue to fix, you can also resubmit your pages for Google to re-index. It can also tell you, for example, if there are negative websites that are of dubious quality linking through to your site.

So black hat techniques are to be avoided at all cost. Old school black hat techniques include putting white text on a white background so you the user won't see it because it would just be invisible. But search engine spiders do see it because it's in the code. Put simply, what happens is that Google looks at the colour of your text versus the colour of your background and works out very quickly that you're trying to hide things - like stuffed keywords or phrases!

Fundamentally, if you take this underhand approach, what you're doing is black hat search engine optimisation, and with automated systems and clever engineers at their disposal, it's almost certainly a losing battle. They're pretty smart bunch!

So a lot of the updates to the Google algorithm that you're hear about - such as penguin, panda and many others as well, are all about looking at quality of content and Google trying to exclude websites that don't reach those quality guidelines.

So, in conclusion, make sure you look at Google's quality guidelines and make sure that you've got the Google Search Console installed. What's more, be sure to stick to the fundamentals as you build your site. As Kyle and Carson always advocate, create great quality and original content. That way, you can't go wrong.