What is black hat SEO? Website penalties

Black hat SEO covers a set of tactics designed to trick Google's algorithms into giving a page a higher position than it deserves. Practices such as cloaking, keyword stuffing or comment spam are its best-known methods.

In a competitive market, who doesn't want quick results? Some techniques do speed them up, but they aren't ethical and they don't hold up over the medium term. This article explains what they are, what can happen to you if you use them and what to do instead.

01What is black hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is any action aimed at manipulating the rules and good practice set out by Google —and by Bing— in order to get a higher ranking than the content deserves.

To win organic traffic and good positions, the real work involves choosing the right keywords, building the page's authority and creating links that make sense. Some people skip all that and go straight to deceptive methods to get to the same place.

These techniques go against Google's guidelines, above all where creating quality content and a decent experience for visitors is concerned. The results can be immediate, but the price is high and it puts all the marketing work behind it at risk.

02The difference between white, grey and black hat SEO

The name comes from western films, where the villains wore black hats and the good guys white ones. The idea carried over into digital marketing, and that's where the three terms come from.

White hat SEO

These are the practices that optimise a page following Google's guidelines: putting the user first, creating relevant content, looking after the experience and, yes, having a design that works on a phone. It's playing by the rules of the game without harming anyone.

Grey hat SEO

The grey area: actions that are neither clearly good nor clearly bad. Broadly, good practice is followed, but every now and then a shortcut gets taken to speed things up. It's common, for instance, in sending email without permission or in comments posted for the sole purpose of getting a link.

03Reasons to avoid black hat SEO

The first is simple: you're not thinking about the person searching for you. You're not producing useful content for your customer, so you're being unfair to the very people you want to sell to.

The second is that you're not playing fair with your competitors either. You're all fighting for the same attention; the sensible thing is to win it with a better product and better service, not with tricks.

And the third is about timescales. Black hat can put you at the top, but not by offering anything relevant. It works in the short term and collapses over the medium and long, so you can't build anything on top of it: no loyalty, no forecasting, no strategy that holds.

Think about it from the other side: you click a result that comes up first, and you find repeated words and a text that says nothing. What do you do? You leave. Google measures that bounce too.

04Google penalties

The penalties vary in severity, but they usually run along these lines:

• A drop in rankings. The page falls in the results and loses visibility, sometimes overnight.
• Loss of authority. Google stops trusting the domain, and that drags down pages that had nothing to do with it.
• Less organic traffic. The direct consequence of the above, and the one you notice in the till.
• New content that doesn't take off. Whatever you publish afterwards takes longer to rank, or doesn't rank at all.

And there's the most serious case: de-indexing, when Google removes the entire site from its index.

Two things are worth telling apart. Manual actions are applied by a person on Google's team and appear in Search Console, in their own section, with the reason and the option to request a review once you've fixed it. Algorithmic adjustments give no warning: they only show up as a drop in the chart. If you suspect a penalty, Search Console is the first place to look, and it's free.

If the penalty does land, the only way out is to fix what caused it and request a review again. Google reconsiders and restores the position if the irregularities were isolated and have been corrected. The key is spotting it early.

05The main black hat SEO techniques

Before you can avoid something you have to recognise it. These are the practices you see most.

Doorway pages

Pages created purely with keywords in order to rank. When someone lands on them, they're sent automatically to another place with the real content.

Cloaking

Showing one thing to Google's crawler and something different to the person visiting. The page is optimised for the indexer, not for whoever reads it.

Link wheels

A network of sites created purely to link to one main site, with the idea that traffic and authority end up concentrated there.

Sneaky redirects

Google points at one piece of content and the user sees another. Sometimes with different redirects depending on whether you arrive from desktop or mobile.

Link farms

Sites stuffed with links to other pages to inflate their relevance. It's far more worthwhile producing content somebody wants to link to.

Irrelevant keywords

Terms with no relation to the content —celebrity names, trending topics— forced into the text. It's spotted immediately.

Comment spam

Posting repeated comments on blogs and social networks to drop links. It does generate links, but it builds no authority of any kind.

Hidden content

Text at zero size or in the same colour as the background. Nobody sees it, but the search engine does read it. And it understands it for what it is.

Duplicate content

Copying text from other sites. Google identifies the original without difficulty, and the one that suffers is the copy.

Paid links

Paying to be linked to. It's hard to detect in an isolated case, but the pattern —lots of links at once, from sites with no connection to yours— gives it away.

06What to do instead

Three alternatives that produce results without taking the risk.

Make it work on mobile

Google indexes the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. If it looks bad there, it doesn't matter how lovely it is on a computer. A responsive design is the minimum today, not an extra.

Choose your keywords properly

Look at the “related searches” Google puts at the bottom of each result page, and the questions in the “People also ask” block. That's where you'll find, for free, how people phrase what you sell.

Write your meta descriptions

Ranking isn't enough: you have to win the click. The meta description is the only part of the result where you can speak directly to whoever is searching. Leaving it empty means handing Google the job of writing it for you.

Black hat can give you a push, but the quality of what it gets is poor and there's no way to build on it. Over the medium term it damages performance and can leave you out of Google altogether. Clean strategies take longer and they last.