Anything worth doing is worth doing right. SEO included!

But what happens when it’s done wrong? 

Black Hat SEO refers to unethical strategies used to manipulate search engine rankings. While these tactics may offer short-term gains, they often result in penalties, de-indexing, or permanent damage to a website’s credibility and domain authority. 

However, like most things in life, things in the SEO world aren’t always so black and white. 

The Three Hats of SEO

White Hat SEO

This is the good stuff. White hat SEO follows search engine rules and prioritizes user experience. 

This includes all aspects of a website’s SEO strategy, from high-quality content and proper keyword usage to ethical link-building.

Black Hat SEO

This is where things get iffy (to say the least).

Black hat SEO engages in a range of deceptive tactics to manipulate search rankings. These practices can lead to penalties or bans from search results, ultimately harming your ongoing SEO strategy.

Grey Hat SEO

When you mix white and black, you get grey.

Grey hat SEO uses strategies that fall somewhere between ethical and manipulative. These tactics, such as excessive guest blogging for backlinks, may not violate guidelines directly but still carry a risk of Google penalties.

7 Black Hat SEO Tactics to Steer Clear Of

1. Keyword Stuffing

Strategic keywords can greatly enhance your SEO performance, but they’re best in moderation. 

Excessively repeating target keywords in content in an attempt to manipulate rankings not only disrupts readability and user experience, but unnatural keyword density can be picked up by Google’s algorithms and penalized.

Psst—this is especially problematic among AI-generated content!

2. Paid Links

When it comes to backlinking, quality beats quantity.

Purchasing backlinks to increase domain authority is against Google's guidelines. Backlinks work because they enhance your site’s credibility, after all. 

It’s only natural that search engines prioritize natural, high-quality links earned from trustworthy sources. 

3. Cloaking

High-quality content caters to readers and search engines alike. However, this is achieved through strategic copywriting, rather than what’s known as cloaking.

Cloaking is a deceptive technique where a website presents different content to search engines than what users actually see. This tactic misleads search engines into ranking a page for keywords that may not be relevant to its real content. 

Many have tried and failed, including even world-renowned brands. Back in 2006, BMW was temporarily blacklisted from Google when they tried to boost rankings through cloaking.

Want to avoid getting blacklisted? Avoid black hat SEO!

4. Abusing Structured Data

Rich results help your website content take centre stage at the top of Google’s search results.

Structured data is a key component to earning those rich results. However, it’s essential to come by them honestly.

Manipulating this schema markup to mislead both search engines and users, for example, by adding fake five-star reviews without real customer feedback or falsely claiming a webpage is an FAQ to gain extra visibility, is a black hat tactic. 

Google actively monitors for structured data abuse and can issue manual penalties or remove rich results from search results.

5. Link Farms

Link farming falls into the same general category as paid links, where a business falsifies its linking strategy to gain traffic and boost its SEO.

A link farm is a network of websites that link to each other solely to enhance rankings, without providing any real value to users. When Google recognizes that a group of low-quality websites engages in interlinking without real, substantial connections, the search engine will de-index those sites and render their links useless.

Watch out for private blog networks as well, another shady link farming tactic wherein several small blogs exist solely to link back to a company’s main website.

6. Blog Comment Spam

Speaking of blogs, be careful not to use spammy blog comments as a means to point visitors toward your website.

Blog comment spam is done primarily through automated bots, but manual spam is a black hat SEO move as well. Not only does flooding blog comments with irrelevant links do nothing to increase your link authority (particularly since Google’s “nofollow” attribute was introduced), but it can result in penalties as well. 

In fact, Mozilla was penalized for precisely this back in 2013, so beware!

7. Sneaky Redirects

When you make updates to your website (and you should!), be extra careful when it comes to redirects.

While a proper redirect will guide users to the correct webpage after a URL change, a sneaky redirect is exactly that—sneaky. It appears to lead to a relevant page, but instead sends users someplace entirely different.

Imagine a website ranking for an informational article, but automatically redirecting visitors to a sales page instead. Sneaky, right? Google thinks so, too, and they actively penalize websites engaging in misleading redirects, sometimes de-indexing entire domains as punishment.

Avoid Black Hat SEO with The Brand Brew ®

You can easily steer clear of black hat SEO (and the grey hat danger zone) by following search engine guidelines and creating high-quality, user-first content. Build backlinks organically through genuine partnerships and avoid manipulative tactics like paid links or link farms.

The Brand Brew ® SEO Website Audit can help you scour your site for any potential problem areas, neutralizing issues before they result in penalties. Or, for an entirely white hat website right out of the gate, our Website Design service prioritizes ethical SEO practices that stand the test of time.

Book a call today to make sure you’re doing SEO above board and in style.

Hats off to you for doing SEO the right way!