What is the Black Hat SEO? How does it work?

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Black Hat SEO Guide

Understand Black Hat SEO and Dominate SERP's

Black Hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As per WiKi - A black hat hacker is a hacker who "violates computer security for little reason beyond maliciousness or for personal gain". Black hat hackers form the stereotypical, illegal hacking groups often portrayed in popular culture, and are "the epitome of all that the public fears in a computer criminal". Black hat hackers break into secure networks to destroy, modify, or steal data; or to make the network unusable for those who are authorized to use the network. Black hat hackers are also referred to as the "crackers" within the security industry and by modern programmers. Crackers keep the awareness of the vulnerabilities to themselves and do not notify the general public or the manufacturer for patches to be applied. Individual freedom and accessibility is promoted over privacy and security. Once they have gained control over a system, they may apply patches or fixes to the system only to keep their reigning control.

Typical Black Hat SEO refers to techniques that are forbidden by search engines as they are used for manipulating search engines ranking and can be a cause of misleading search results. Performing black hat SEO can lead to a damaged reputation and getting websites banned from search engines.

On the opposite side, White Hat SEO is the practice of following techniques and methodologies that strictly adhere to search engine guidelines and focus on making the internet a better and a more informative place. It is all about employing optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that make things better from a human user's perspective.

Black hat SEO is a kind of practice that increases a page's rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines. Performing black hat SEO can lead to a damaged reputation, getting websites banned from search engines

Black hat SEO refers to the use of violent SEO strategy, techniques and procedure that focus only on search engines and not a human user, and usually does not follow search engines guidelines.

Black Hat SEO definition: Black hat SEO is a practice that increases a page's rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines' terms of service. The term "black hat" originated in Western movies to distinguish the "bad guys" from the "good guys," who wore white hats (see white hat SEO). Recently, it's used more commonly to describe computer hackers, virus creators, and those who perform unethical actions with computers

In Short:

Some unprofessional SEO experts use unethical ways to promote a website. Using Black Hat SEO technique we can get a website on the top of a search engine with little work in less time, but it will be effective for very short time. As Google continually changing their search algorithm and SEO updates such as Panda, Penguin, Pay Day Loan etc after some time crawler takes an action and bans the website permanently or show a decreased website traffic.

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Black Hat SEO Tactics

Content Automation

Content of the websites are automatically created using a tool

Doorway Pages: According to the Google Webmaster Guidelines, Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries.

They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination.
They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.
A doorway page might even take a searcher away from the page they thought they were being directed to and send them to a different website.

Hidden Text or Links: Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:

Using white text on a white background
Locating text behind an image
Using CSS to position text off-screen
Setting the font size to 0
Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph

Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing is a Black Hat SEO technique used to overload keywords onto a Web page so search engines will read the page as being relevant in a Web search.
Reporting a Competitor

Report a competitor as spam for SERP and remove them to decrease the competition until they recover back from it.
Report Competitors Black Hat SEO Techniques to Google here.

Sneaky Redirects: Redirecting is the act of sending a visitor to a different URL than the one they initially requested. There are many good reasons to redirect one URL to another, such as when moving your site to a new address, or consolidating several pages into one.
Cloaking: Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.

Black Hat SEO Tactics and Techniques

Black Hat SEO Techniques

Link Manipulation - Buying links, advertorials, and link schemes: Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site. The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
Excessive link exchanges ("Link to me and I'll link to you") or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking.
Large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links.
Using automated programs or services to create links to your site etc.

Article Spinning

Article spinning is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique by which search engine optimizers post a unique version of relevant content on article directories, web 2.0 sites, or other sources for backlinks.
This process can be completely automated or rewritten manually.
Many article marketers believe that article spinning helps avoid the feared penalties in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for using duplicate content
However, most uses of spun content are considered a black hat SEO spam practice.

Link Farms

On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group
A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamdexing or spamexing).
Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites and are not considered a form of spamdexing.

Link Wheels

Link wheel creation is a technique in which you have to create a wheel of links and you have to give link to main blog also from other blogs. It might be very hard to understand just by text
The LinkWheel is a link building technique that is way more efficient than any other link building strategy and that’s the reason it’s been banned by most search engines.
For example, if you have 6 blogs created by free site providing sites + 1 main blog then what you have to do is to give link from 1st free blog to 2nd, 2nd to 3rd,3rd to 4th,4th to 5th,5th to 6th and finally 6th to 1st. By this way, you will create a wheel of link and after creating wheel, you just have to give links to your main blog(money blog) from every free blog.

Link Networks

A link network means generating vast quantities of artificial links on a large number of websites that they control. The website withing that network has very little value to visitors, its only function is to manipulate the ranking of search results.

Rich Snippet Markup Spam

As Google tries to offer their users pertinent results to their queries with their latest updates ( Panda 4.0 and Payday Loans 2.0 ), there is a new trend on the rise – the rich snippet abuse.
Rich snippets weren’t really a priority for black hat SEO’s in the past, but somehow they’ve managed to turn them into exploits

Fake an Author Profile Photo
Fake a Popular Author Name
Fake a Video Preview etc.

Automated Queries to Google

Google's Terms of Service do not allow the sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express permission in advance from Google. Sending automated queries consumes resources and includes using any software (such as WebPosition Gold) to send automated queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage ranks in Google search results for various queries.
In addition to rank checking, other types of automated access to Google without permission are also a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines and Terms of Service.

Creating pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs.
Printer-only versions of web pages

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid... "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.

Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, trojans, and other malware

Distributing content or software on your website that behaves in a way other than what a user expected is a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines.
This includes anything that manipulates content on the page in an unexpected way, downloads or executes files on a user’s computer without their consent, or does not comply with the Google Unwanted Software Policy.
Google not only aims to give its users the most relevant search results for their queries, but also to keep them safe on the web.

White hat versus black hat techniques

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. The search engines attempt to minimize the effect of the latter, among them spamdexing. Industry commentators have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.

An SEO technique is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Another category sometimes used is grey hat SEO. This is in between black hat and white hat approaches where the methods employed avoid the site being penalised however do not act in producing the best content for users, rather entirely focused on improving search engine rankings.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. One example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.

Black Hat SEO Vs White Hat SEO

Comparison chart

	Black Hat SEO	White Hat SEO
Meaning	Techniques used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner.	Conforms to search engine designs and involves no deception.
Status	Disapproved by search engines.	Approved by search engines.
Result	Site is eventually banned, de-indexed or penalized through lower rankings.	Results last a long time.
Techniques	Black hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, doorway and cloaked pages, link farming, hidden texts and links, blog comment spam.	White hat SEO techniques include research, analysis, re- write meta tags to be more relevant, content improvement and web redesign.

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Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practitioners. While we abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEO Information Technology is a clean white hat SEO company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.

Listed are few ways to use black hat SEO for your SERP's benefits

IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.
301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.
Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com
Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.
Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.
Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.
Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.
Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.
Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.
Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do
Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.
.
Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.
Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.
Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.
Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.
Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.
New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.
Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.
Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.
Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.
Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.
Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.
Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.
Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.
Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.
Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.
Different content for search engines than users – Do you use WordPress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.
Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.
Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullshit” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.
Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.

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Using black hat SEO techniques is like walking through a minefield. As Google gets better at spotting these dodgy shortcuts to higher rankings, dabbling in the dark arts could land your website in serious trouble.

A good understanding of how some of the common black hat tactics work will not only help you steer clear of them, it will also help you develop better white hat SEO strategies.

Highly-successful search engine marketers who struggle with their technical SEO are as useless as black hat geeks who struggle with their content and promotional strategies.

SEO Company Mumbai

Summary

In fact, there are still a lot of black hat techniques that have not mentioned above, which used to be the most popular black hat techniques, and some of them still are. If you are using any of techniques above, you should stop doing them. Sooner or later, Google algorithms will catch up, and it will be too late for you. As always, please leave a comment if you have any comment or suggestion.

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A comprehensive guide to black hat SEO. Black Hat SEO methods, Black Hat SEO Tactics, Black Hat SEO Techniques, Black Hat SEO Vs White Hat SEO Mumbai INDIA.