Black Hat SEO: What should you know?

The temptation to give in to the sirens of Black Hat SEO is sometimes great for e-tailers and SEOs who pursue ambitious goals. If the results can be there - at least on an ad hoc basis - adopting this type of strategy is not without risk. Discover this concept, its methods, its advantages and the dangers it involves.

The concept of Black Hat SEO

The instructions issued by Google, the engine responsible for most of the organic web traffic in Europe, are at the origin of this expression. Web marketers who tend to perfectly respect these famous “ Guidelines” Are considered professionals with the white hat (White Hat), examples to which we oppose the people who break the rules and share one thing in common: their objective is above all to please the engines in order to see the pages of their site climb in the ranking. An exhaustive tutorial, presenting unique content, naturally shared on social networks and on forums, is the illustration of a White Hat work generally valued by the engine. Conversely, a botched subject, which only partially responds to the problem of a user and which was only created to generate a backlink to another site, this is the typical approach that deplores and penalizes Google. However, there is a multitude of situations that do not correspond to these two frameworks. Let us quote for example a too long loading of pages related to the absence of caching or the acquisition of many never optimized links that do not risk penalizing the site towards which they point but will not improve either its popularity. In addition, it is obvious to stigmatize a technique which does not have any interest as such for a Net surfer, as the low-quality pages of a blog network. However, if it allows an attractive online store to overtake an e-commerce site which was above all at the top of the results thanks to an aggressive net linking, should we be moved? The end justifies the means… some webmasters probably say to themselves.

Black Hat SEO: methods and their benefits

The contents

The publication of texts aimed solely at improving the positioning of a site is one of the actions favored by the supporters of Black Hat SEO. These are, for example, spinned content that is very similar to each other and does not add value since a single version generally makes it possible to respond to the request made by the user of a search engine. The creation of a network of sites fed by Splog combines texts of poor quality with netlinking which has no real interest for the Internet user. The stuffing of keywords and the duplication of content (likely to be copied to another site) are some of the techniques that are easy to implement. The first has no more impact, the second can work in some cases as we will discuss later.

Technical parameters

To try to deceive the engines in order to improve the organic visibility of its site, webmasters implement cloaking. The aim is to present two separate contents for a single page, depending on the target audience. A first version is revealed to the robots of the search engines, often over-optimized and stuffed with keywords relating to the activity that one practices, a second version is offered to Internet users. The excessive use of redirects is also one of the technical possibilities requested by webmasters to manipulate the results of Google and other engines. It is in particular possible to carry out a transfer of popularity while preserving its main site (the one by which one carries out conversions) with the 301 redirect.

The links

From the neophyte to the passionate autodidact via the creative developer: the acquisition of links in order to artificially increase the popularity of a site interests very different audiences. If obtaining backlinks on blogs already heavily solicited by spam does not help to improve positioning, the discovery of “spots” (places) where to put a contextualized link on an address from which the Metrics are positively distinguished (Trust flow in particular) can radically impact visibility on engines. Even if the backlink in question - being found for example on a forum or a social network with strong reputation (such as a .gov extension) - ultimately only serves to generate popularity and constitutes in this a Black Hat action. To identify beneficial locations, followers of this practice use for example a tool such as Scrapebox. Even without this software, the use of fingerprints gives the opportunity to find sites to host your future links. To identify blogs accepting comments, we distinguish this command in particular:

intext: »Website» AND intext: »Leave a comment Cancel reply» «targeted keyword or expression»

Negative SEO and advanced techniques

We could have made it only a subset of the previous paragraph. But we wanted to give more importance to Negative SEO which certainly feeds on the concept that is the subject of this article. Often called the NSEO, it consists of carrying out actions with the aim of damaging the natural referencing of a competitor. Mechanically, you can gain positions and even directly increase your visibility with one of the advanced techniques that we will discuss. “Link poisoning” has already affected many platforms and will undoubtedly still be responsible for upheavals in the SERPs in the future. There is little point in creating thousands of toxic links to give a competing site a negative image with Google, the latter having already assimilated this method and does not penalize the platform which is under attack. On the other hand, it is rather obvious to commit considerable damage by increasing the popularity of the “targeted” competitor with thousands of quality links, then by making them suddenly disappear. Another unsavory technique: steal well-positioned content from a competitor and take credit for it by taking advantage of canonical tags. Did you also know that it was still possible to inject a faulty Meta NoIndex tag into blogs or faulty security stores, causing content to be indexed? Among other approaches that may be used, there is a completely legal form of disclosure which consists of identifying licensed content on a website (WordPress theme and images for example) that have been pirated and alerting their creators. Without recommending them, we encourage you to learn about all of these procedures in order to protect yourself from possible attacks.

Black Hat SEO: methods and their benefits

The contents

The publication of texts aimed solely at improving the positioning of a site is one of the actions favored by the supporters of Black Hat SEO. These are, for example, spinned content that is very similar to each other and does not add value since a single version generally makes it possible to respond to the request made by the user of a search engine. The creation of a network of sites fed by Splog combines texts of poor quality with net linking which has no real interest for the Internet user. The stuffing of keywords and the duplication of content (likely to be copied to another site) are some of the techniques that are easy to implement. The first has no more impact, the second can work in some cases as we will discuss later.

Technical parameters

To try to deceive the engines in order to improve the organic visibility of its site, webmasters implement cloaking. The aim is to present two separate contents for a single page, depending on the target audience. A first version is revealed to the robots of the search engines, often over-optimized and stuffed with keywords relating to the activity that one practice, a second version is offered to Internet users. The excessive use of redirects is also one of the technical possibilities requested by webmasters to manipulate the results of Google and other engines. It is in particular possible to carry out a transfer of popularity while preserving its main site (the one by which one carries out conversions) with the 301 redirects.

The links

From the neophyte to the passionate autodidact via the creative developer: the acquisition of links in order to artificially increase the popularity of site interests very different audiences. If obtaining backlinks on blogs already heavily solicited by spam does not help to improve positioning, the discovery of “spots” (places) where to put a contextualized link on an address from which the Metrics are positively distinguished (Trust flow in particular) can radically impact visibility on engines. Even if the backlink in question - being found for example on a forum or a social network with a strong reputation (such as a .gov extension) - ultimately only serves to generate popularity and constitutes in this a Black Hat action. To identify beneficial locations, followers of this practice use, for example, a tool such as Scrapebox. Even without this software, the use of fingerprints gives the opportunity to find sites to host your future links. To identify blogs accepting comments, we distinguish this command in particular:

intext: »Website» AND intext: »Leave a comment Cancel reply» «targeted keyword or expression»

Negative SEO and advanced techniques

We could have made it only a subset of the previous paragraph. But we wanted to give more importance to Negative SEO which certainly feeds on the concept that is the subject of this article. Often called the NSEO, it consists of carrying out actions with the aim of damaging the natural referencing of a competitor. Mechanically, you can gain positions and even directly increase your visibility with one of the advanced techniques that we will discuss. “Link poisoning” has already affected many platforms and will undoubtedly still be responsible for upheavals in the SERPs in the future. There is little point in creating thousands of toxic links to give a competing site a negative image with Google, the latter having already assimilated this method and does not penalize the platform which is under attack. On the other hand, it is rather obvious to commit considerable damage by increasing the popularity of the “targeted” competitor with thousands of quality links, then by making them suddenly disappear. Another unsavory technique: steal well-positioned content from a competitor and take credit for it by taking advantage of canonical tags. Did you also know that it was still possible to inject a faulty Meta NoIndex tag into blogs or faulty security stores, causing content to be indexed? Among other approaches that may be used, there is a completely legal form of disclosure which consists of identifying licensed content on a website (WordPress theme and images for example) that have been pirated and alerting their creators. Without recommending them, we encourage you to learn about all of these procedures in order to protect yourself from possible attacks.

The Risks of Becoming Black Hat SEO

Types of penalties

As indicated in the first part of our article, the border between tolerated and prohibited practices is frequently drawn. In addition, with the rules laid down by Google evolving rapidly, actions that were not objectionable for a decade can suddenly be penalized. The more you embrace the approach of a Black Hat SEO, the more you run the risk of seeing your site (or those of its customers) be sanctioned one day or another. We distinguish on the one hand the so-called automatic penalties, on the other hand, manual penalties. The two filters Panda and Penguin allow Google to generate more relevant search results and are similar to automatic penalties. The first disadvantage addresses that are characterized by low-quality content, the second has been integrated into the algorithm to combat unnatural link profiles. As such, the creation of pages with low added value, only published to maximize the number of contents in the index, may be penalized. Difficult also to pass under the radar when one suddenly obtains very many links whose anchors are systematically over-optimized, ie containing keywords related to the activity of the site. Manual penalties imposed by members of the Google Search Quality Team are reported in the Google Search Console. Difficult also to pass under the radar when one suddenly obtains very many links whose anchors are systematically over-optimized, ie containing keywords related to the activity of the site. Manual penalties imposed by members of the Google Search Quality Team are reported in the Google Search Console. Difficult also to pass under the radar when one suddenly obtains very many links whose anchors are systematically over-optimized, ie containing keywords related to the activity of the site. Manual penalties imposed by members of the Google Search Quality Team are reported in the Google Search Console.

What sanctions for offenders?

Your activity, like that of your customers, can be significantly affected by these penalties. In the best of cases, it is a decline in the pages concerned in the engine, this is called downgrading. If you convert to a large extent through a few queries, this type of sanction can have dramatic consequences on your turnover. Do you present duplicate content? They risk disappearing altogether from the search results, it is a deindexation. The most serious penalty is embodied by website blacklisting. A sanction which is not definitive but which often requires specific actions to be again considered as “frequentable” by the dominant engine. If you fear the worst, fill in the command without quotes “site: yourdomainname.com”, an address belonging to the blacklist does not appear during this search. By adopting NSEO-related procedures, you also run the risk of being attacked by competitors. And if you have implemented advanced techniques including piracy, legal sanctions cannot be excluded.

Difficult to advise you to adopt a particular approach, it is up to you to judge the risks and determine if the game is worth it. You have to be humble and keep in mind that practice can work quite well for a while and be penalized thereafter. If we were to make a recommendation to you as a metaphor, it was a question of not having all your eggs in one basket. In other words, the platforms whose audience does not depend mainly on natural results are undoubtedly those which have the most radiant future.