There are two ways to do search engine optimization: the right way and the wrong way.
What Is Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is the wrong way. Black hat refers to the use of techniques and strategies that usually run against search engines’ guidelines. In most cases, people use black hat SEO techniques to “game” the search engine results and come out on top of the results pages – even when their site does not deserve a top spot. These tactics are designed to manipulate the results that search engines deliver.
On the other end of the spectrum, people use white hat SEO to earn a position among the top results of the search engines.
What Happens when People Use Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is not a sustainable practice. That means companies that use these underhanded, aggressive techniques will be found out (usually sooner than later) and Google will penalize their sites. It is difficult to recover from a Google penalty, which can remove a website from the search engines entirely, so it’s always best to stick with white hat SEO and avoid penalties from the start.
Examples of Black Hat SEO
Keyword stuffing
“Invisible” text (text that includes keywords butblends in with the page so readers cannot see it)
Page swapping (making massive changes to a page once it has ranked in the search engines)
Doorway pages
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