Black Hat SEO Techniques to Stay Away From
At some point you might be enticed to try and venture out into the black hat SEO area but do it with great caution. It might sound great to achieve results quickly but you run the risk of having your website simply disappear overnight. What will you do when the website you have been trying to build up for many years simply disappears?
Black hat SEO techniques that I recommend STAYING FAR AWAY FROM:
Buying Links: The search engines hate this and they have already said that it is not allowed yet people still try and do it. It might sound nice to buy a link but if it gets traced back to you and how you acquired that link you could quickly see a penalty appear on your website.
Link Exchanges: Link exchanges where very popular years ago but they are very frowned upon at this point. If they happen naturally they are fine but once they are forced that is when you run into problems. For example, you do a write up regarding a viral marketing campaign occurring from company XYZ that you like and in return a week later company XYZ is so flattered you decided to write about them that they write in their blog how you wrote about them leaving a link behind to your website. This is a natural pathway for exchanging links.
Automation For Anything: Some people swear by automation and some think it is very unethical depending on what you are using it for but using it for things like Facebook or Twitter have been known to be a bit unethical.
Article Spinning: Taking an article and re-writing it 47 times is just bad practice. Actually re-writing it a few times and taking a different approach or stance on a subject is one thing but submitting essentially the same content numerous times is just a blatant attempt to really spam the search engines.
Try to avoid any type of black hat SEO attempts if at all possible. Black hat techniques almost always lead to something bad at one point or another. Plus if you follow guidelines and search engines change their practice you don’t run the risk of receiving any future penalties from search engines.
34 Responses to “Black Hat SEO Techniques to Stay Away From”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
couldn’t agree more..
black hat SEO shall never be the path of a true online professional..
but if we “properly” developed a website for years..
why should we turn to a black hat?
These aren’t black hat techniques, only gray hat. Black hat techniques include hacking to place links or sabotage competition, spamming, cookie stuffing, automatic commentators, or any method that would require you to use proxies and link cloaking in order to not get caught.
Hi Jamie,
Okay, then maybe I should have called this blog post “Black and Gray Hat SEO Techniques to Stay Away From”…
Thanks for reading and your comment!
Nick
At one point, we put a large effort to track back all paid links of our competitors and report them to Google, Bing and Yahoo. I have to say that nothing bad happened to our competitors at all. The sites that do get penalized are the really small ones that sold the links. So you should revise that a little more to specify which way the penalty goes. Not to mention that link exchanges is too broad. Content relevant link exchanges are fine and have great value.
Hi Berto,
Thanks for your comment and sharing your thoughts.
There is a great resource directly from the Google webmaster central that talks more about link exchanges and other forms of “link schemes”:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
Thanks & Take Care,
Nick
If you have a highly competitive product, and everyone else is spinning articles, how can you compete with that?
It is not an easy task to write 50 unique articles on the same topic for 50 article directories.
Hi Deb,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!
The best way to take a white hat approach to link building is by building up your brand and marketing your business on line through many different sources of visitors (and links!).
From my experience, this is the best long term approach to link building…
Thanks again & Take care,
Nick
Good to know, I have been a web designer for over 3 years now and specialise in onsite SEO, and I never realised buying links was so frowned upon! But totally agree with ‘article spinning’ point, you can’t flog a dead horse if you can’t write fresh articles on your product or service, then your product or service isn’t that interesting. Gain traffic through another way.
Hi Rory,
Thanks for your comment!
My thought about web marketing in general is to build your visitors through many ways: SEO, Social Media, PPC, Email Marketing, etc…
Even though I am partial to SEO, I never recommend putting all of your eggs in one basket!
Thanks & Take Care,
Nick
BlackHat SEO sounds great to those who want ‘quick results’ but they do not always find out until its too late that the blackhate seo wasn’t long term. Patience is the best skill you can attain, and when applied with SEO — its more than a skill or virtue. Good real SEO gives long term results and traffic.
So true, real white hat SEO takes time and is truly a building process…thanks for your comment!
If you need to turn to black hat dark side, you can always visit this http://proxylist.co site to get what you need for your dark side SEO work.
Great article and always useful to have a refresher on this….I did have one question in regards to the automation: If you post something on Facebook and it automatically shows up as a Tweet for you in Twitter, is THIS what you are referring to as being bad?
Thanks!
Hi,
Thanks for the article. I just finished keeping track with some new such “techniques” today, so your article couldn’t come at a better time.
Couldnt agree more. Well said
Question. Link buying is definitely a no no but what if your link profile has a lot of blog sidebar links in it that were not bought? Will you get a penalty for having links that look like potentially they were paid for (even if they were not) or does it take something more to get busted for this? Looking for the real granular detail behind this.
Not so long ago I realized I had 1 paid link and quickly had it changed to a “no follow”. Am I going overboard?
Buying links is on top of my black hats techniques. I can understand someone paying a fee to a moderated directory. Automating other tasks are what makes computers great tools. However when it comes to building links, you end up just spamming or linking to irrelevant websites. Sooner or later your scheme will be discovered and you will be banned.
I don’t know if this is right, but i found I usally don’t get back links but once out of 10 articles. So i submitte each article i submit to 10 or mor directories with out spinning it, so I can make sure I get at lest one link. I heard Google just deindexes articles that are duplicate. any thoughts? I haven’t gotten in trouble yet, plus I get visitors from reading my articles. and I’m not decieving Google by spinning them
What about blog link networks that don’t necessary exchange reciprocal links, but provide back links by distributing your article to blogs over time, such as SEO Linkvine? Is this considered black hat?
Who actually decides what black hat is and why is it frowned on.
The reality of the web is that big G has decided for some reason that backlinks are an indication of a websites relevance. This is mostly because they have not figured out how to access content in relation to a search term.
Who has more backlinks than someone like Amazon with all the affiliate links in circulation. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Amazon is worthy of being included in search results as relevant to a search term.
Google started this fiasco by using backlinks as a means to rate site relevance and because it is so easy to simulate relevance by buying/exchanging/spamming backlinks Google cry’s black hat and foul.
It is Googles created problem so Google should fix it by creating a search engine that actually rates content rather than relying on something a silly as backlinks to decide relevance!
What about posting a single article on the 340 or so article directories that are out there? Is that an effective one-shot move to get better link ranking for one site? Or a good move for a many links for a single sub-page, relatively easy and inexpensive?
Hi Shaz,
I would consider this social media marketing, not black hat SEO or link building…
Hi Nick,
Thanks for the comment and questions, I would actually need to look at your blog to give you an educated clear answer, but as far as I am concerned, if you think white hat, then it is not going overboard…
Hi Fred,
I would say creating different articles is always the best way to go and I have not seen or heard of any penalties issued for this, but the links may not have as much value. Less is always more!
Hi Scott W,
Less is always more!
Hi Nick.
I liked the article. I agree with the people who said some of it was not blackhat. I have bought links befroe and am starting to stop doing that. I have started writing articles (have done 7 so far) and just submit the same article to 50+ directories manually. I don’t believe in spinning. I can’t understand how google can deny you a backlink for content that may be the same but is submitted to different sites. That should be acceptable. How google can sort of penalize you by not indexing all the articles on the different sites is unfair and I don’t accept it. I will continue to submit the same article to different ezines as that is my right. I hope that the threat of facebook can moderate google’s out of control behavior. It was high time they were given pushback.
Hi Nick. Relevant exchange of links can by no means be called black hat technique. The emphasis has to be on “relevant” but I have found that exchanging links has worked to improve the page rank of our travel accommodation website. Google webmaster tips state ” Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging” should be avoided. Note the use of “excessive” – Google rewards appropriate link exchanges.
The techniques you describe are very much in the grey hat world.
Also grey are things like having PR5 or better blogs write you up for beer money. (And, yes, I do know PR no longer counts for much.)
If nothing else the site will send the spider your way.
And pay attention to what the spider can find. Basic site architecture can make a huge difference.
Hi Nick
. which one we should follow. I like your every article you writer but today at this point you really put us in confusion.
once again great post thats why i have subscribed this blog.
i wanna to ask you one thing that many articles specifies that link building (exchanging links & buying links) plays a key role in SEO. Its plays a vital role to drag traffic to website which leads to increases PR and at same time you pointed this to Black Hat SEO which means it wil not benificial for us for long time.
Thanks Naveen Bhandari
Hi Chris,
We shall see if Facebook will replace Google (I personally don’t think so as the 2 companies have different goals)…
Anyway, thanks for reading and your comment!
Nick
As another pointed out, none of these are Black Hat – which, in the community, has a very specific definition that doesn’t gybe with your article. Perhaps “don’t get caught in these SEO practices”.
But black hat drives more eyeballs….
Great post Nick
Google is catching on to these blackhat/greyhat link building. And i believe google is not giving credit or is giving penalties. I think this started about 6 months ago.Others i know have seen this also.
On article spinning i stay away from it for 2 reasons.most spinners make the articles sound terrible and google i think is picking up on this. I believe in quality over quantity. We write for the customer first and search engines second..just like those auto blogs..I call them spam blogs or S”+__ blogs.Google is picking these up and throwing them out also.
Quality over quantity and consistent are my motto’s. Like the turtle you will win the the long term.
Hi Jing,
Thanks very much for reading and your comment!
I agree, article spinning is a black hat SEO type of activity that I always recommend staying away from. There are good white hat ways to recycle content and article spinning is not one of them!
Thanks & Take Care!
Nick
Nick,
What about submitting the same articles to multiple sites, but varying the author’s box on each submission?
Hi John,
As far as I am concerned, having a unique article for each placement works better but if you submit an article to multiple quality sites (such as Associated Content, Hubpages, etc.) then I think you should be fine…its when people use article spinning to pump out and submit many articles, then it starts to get spamming and black hat.
Thanks for reading!
Nick
I am using a CMS and by default the title is pulled from the first in the body. There are certain situations where there are tags between the s, for example, This is a great title. Well, for me, I need to remove the italics tags, so a javascript that removes them and replaces the title with the non-tagged version is very useful. And since I didn’t know the syntax was document.title, this is very helpful.
I sort of believe in gray hat seo…if there’s such a thing.