Black Hat SEO

The term Black Hat SEO refers to all search engine optimization practices that do not follow the standards established by Google (Google webmaster Guidelines) and their use is penalized. Its name comes from the Western movies in which the villains always wore a black hat. The hero, despite everything, white and from there derives the term White Hat SEO.

General information

The Black Hat SEO is considered spam and aims to increase the presence on the network artificially, for example, through link farms and hidden content - Text Hiding. Another illegal practice is the automatic creation of links on the pages of the web portal to increase popularity by adding poor quality content and without consistency.

The XRumer software, for example, is used in the Black Hat SEO to generate and post automated comments on forums and blogs. In addition, expired domain links and the creation of so-called satellite domain networks are purchased. The article spinning It is also part of a practice of Black Hat SEO. Some web operators use these tactics, which are prohibited by Google, to fight competition and to deliberately ban their websites from the search engine index.

Advantages and disadvantages

The advantages of Black Hat SEO is that website owners can quickly increase the popularity of links and their ranking in the SERPs. Many webmasters use these practices because due to the number of different trackers, detecting these practices usually takes a little time. However, the illegal practices of the Black Hat SEO they are penalized with a deterioration of the positioning or even the total expulsion of the Google search results.

Problems with users

The webmasters who use these practices know that they will be penalized and carry out their illicit SEO positioning strategy with a few precise short-term goals. Google penalizes a specific number of pages, in this way webmasters create more pages with the same content. From this dynamic, the probabilities that any of the pages will enter the Google database and appear in the SERPs is greater.

Google anti spam methods

Google always tries to increase the detection power of such illegal practices with regular updates of its algorithms, such as the Panda update. This update is mostly focused on identifying duplicate, poor quality or copied content, and link spam practices. A little later Google launched its Penguin update which intensified the detection power of its algorithms to further complicate the practice of these techniques.

White Hat SEO vs. Black Hat SEO

Due to the numerous updates of Google's algorithms and the continuous changes in the tutorial of practices approved by Google (Google Webmaster Guidelines) it is very difficult for webmasters to act without violating any of the Google standards. For this the White Hat SEO has become an almost impossible practice and there is currently a "middle class" that encompasses those practices that are not totally illegal but not optimal from the eyes of Google. This new concept is called Gray Hat SEO and most websites in any industry fall under the standards of this new class.