What is Black Hat SEO? Can You Get Away With Doing It?

Most people have heard of SEO and everyone wants their website to rank high on Google. But did you know that there are different ways of doing this. The first is known as white SEO and involves writing good content, getting people to link to your content and pursuing traffic for your website or blog.

Now some people have heard of Black SEO but a lot of those people believe that this was a thing of the past, done when Google algorithms where less intelligent but you’ll be surprised to hear that people perform black hat SEO to this day, but why?

Black hat SEO are tactics that are used to rank a website that violates search engine guidelines. Black hat SEO techniques attempt to manipulate search engine algorithms to increase a site’s rankings

Google makes it very clear which types of practices go against their terms. They’re also quite clear on the potential outcomes if you violate their guidelines. Using black hat SEO tactics can lead to your website being penalized (either algorithmically or with a manual action), which means lower-ranking positions, most likely, a decline in organic traffic and sometime an outright ban from Google.

The Risks of Black Hat SEO

So there are significant risks involved with using black hat tactics to rank your website, and that’s the reason why most SEOs choose not to consider such approaches. The majority of the SEO industry deems these practices to be completely unethical.

But the reality is that there are, and likely always will be, a small percentage of marketers who want to try and cheat the system and try to fast-track their site’s organic success. However, even if black hat SEO techniques prove to work for your website, the results are short-lived.. So why do some marketer do it.

There are reasons to risk doing black hat SEO

1. it’s a new, throw away domain that you’re going to use for a month or so or until Google discovers what you are doing. This tactic is often used by lead generation companies and in the month or so that the website gets away with it  a lot of money has been made from generated leads.

2. The owner/marketer is going to try to sell the domain as a premium domain for upwards of £3000 if it’s in a popular niche, the buyer (or victim) is unaware that the site will disappear from the rankings after few weeks and will have nothing to show for their money. We don’t recommend buying so called premium domains off anyone because if it’s not a scam, domain squatters are the cesspool of the internet anyway.

Back in the early 2000’s when Google’s algorithms where much simpler and owning a domain name with a keyword in it guaranteed page 1 rankings, domain squatters made a lot of money by buying up thousands of domain names and selling them at premium prices.

Back then it was immoral but today’s domain squatters are usually outright conmen falsifying traffic and rankings to make a domain name seem more powerful than it is.

3 Another relatively new use of Black Hat SEO that we have seen cropping up recently involves local business rankings and here’s how it works.

A domain name is purchased for a local business niche, let’s say local locksmiths. The website is put together using every black hat SEO method in the book such as hidden text, script text, keyword stuffing etc. Now a black hat local business website can shoot up the rankings in a few days and stay there for a month before Google drops it and it’s within this time period where the owner rents/sells the websites telephone number to a local locksmith.

Local businesses like this tend to target 15-20 miles around their location so the Black Hat marketer has a few areas on the go at once, typically large cities such as Manchester, Birmingham etc where they are guaranteed lots of calls. The Black Hat marketer will also have dozens of clone sites and new domains waiting to take over when the current site get penalised and dropped.

Google are aware on this new use of Black Hat SEO and they WILL combat it in some way because its currently making a mockery of their local rankings.