I'm sure you've heard of Black Hat SEO. No matter how much English you know, you may Black hat SEO tell you nothing.
To understand it, you have to travel to the American West in the 19th century. Or, if you are a long way off, to one of the western that we will undoubtedly have seen at some point. This very year, The Power of the Dog from Jane Champion won the Oscar for best director.
As the antagonist of The Power of the Dog or series such as Westworldblack hats have become a sign that, as spectators, we understand that someone is malevolent or at least problematic.
At SEOA black hat therefore indicates a practice that could be called "criminal", not in the sense that they are illegal, because they are not, but in the sense that they are strategies that seek to use trickery and, in the final analysis, outsmart Google.
However, the Westerns themselves help us to imagine what might happen. Maybe the villain robs a bank or some cows, but the sheriff, our friend Google, catches him in the end.
The Black Hat SEO promises fast and effective results, while the White Hat SEO requires the monitoring of SEO guidelines in the long term, going little by little. But as the saying goes, Rome was not built in an hourand, if you want content for SEO positioning, the Black Hat Seo is bread for today and hunger for tomorrow.
What is Black Hat SEO?
The Black Hat SEO o Black hat SEO is the name given to a series of techniques designed to improving organic positioning by trickery or deception, rather than following Google's guidelines.
The aim is to cheating the algorithm to achieve a higher score, by means of on page actions and off page. In this way, it is possible to appear in the first results of the SERP without the time-consuming process that is involved in a SEO content strategy traditional.
The Black Hat SEO is not new. In fact, it has been around almost since the beginning of the search engine. Over the last 20 years Google has evolved a lot and the algorithm is very different from what it was at the beginning.
With each new development, these questions were being answered. black hat strategiesavoiding cheating in order to be more useful to the user. And don't think that we are talking about strategies followed by a few hackers and that's it, they are actually quite widespread.
When I started working in SEO, soon to be a decade ago, my job was based on generating Black Hat content as a freelancer for a marketing agency. I spent at least two years generating content for external linkbuilding strategies until the algorithm was updated.
Suddenly, it was no longer enough to publish an article with an anchor text determined on any random blog, now it took into account the domain authority and the relationship of the blog with the subject matter to be positioned.
Like this example, the SEO practices have evolved over the last ten years. There are fewer and fewer tricks and shortcuts, and when they are discovered, Google takes less time to fix them.
That is why, Black Hat SEO is not a good idea in the long term..
Why avoid Black Hat SEO?
Let's take a hypothetical situation. You have a business that you want to position and you discover some of the techniques Black Hat SEO I'm going to tell you about later, what are you doing?
You may be tempted to take the fast track and look to rank as quickly as possible. This way, you get results while your normal strategy is working, or even allows you to work on some Creative SEO without so much pressure for immediate results.
If, like me, you work for an agency and have to face your clients, the temptation is even stronger. In the reports you present you will be able to give better data and keep the account more easily.
However, I do not recommend it.
First of all because it is a temporary solution. Good SEO is the one that is not afraid of Google algorithm updates.. It gives a lot of peace of mind to know that the job is well done and that no matter what happens you won't have to deal with a crisis the next day.
Even so, sometimes, a new algorithm may temporarily lower our results. In my experience, if the work is well done, it's a matter of a day or two while it finishes readjusting.
On the other hand, it should be noted that if the algorithm discovers that you have made Black Hat SEO will penalise you and may even kick you out of the search results.
What's the point of having good data for a report today if tomorrow you're going to have to start from scratch? It's a waste of time. For those obsessed with time management like me, it doesn't make any sense.
Last but not least, Black Hat SEO does not give users what they need.. The SEO objective is not simply bringing traffic to a website, it is usually starting a conversion funnel. To do that, you have to give the user what they want. And for that we have to do White Hat SEOThat's all there is to it.
Black Hat SEO techniques to avoid
Since examples make everything easier to understand, let's look at some of them. Black Hat SEO techniques that work and that have stopped working, as well as others that continue to work (for the time being).
Duplicate content
This is one of the first techniques that the algorithm learned to detect. Generate duplicate content is useless and may even be considered spam.
In the early days, many webmasters were generating pages and pages of duplicate content seeking to be more relevant to Google. To this day it sounds ridiculous and although Google usually marks one of the URLs as the Canonical URL It is always advisable to make the work easier for her and to mark it ourselves.
If we mark a URL as canonical Google will know that it is the only one to take into account in case we are obliged to have variations, as may be the case in ecommerce product catalogues.
However, if possible, it is always advisable to have a single visible URL with one type of content.
Keyword Stuffing
Avoid the keyword stuffing is very important because most of the SEO plugins for WordPress still do not take it into account. By this anglicism I mean repeating a particular keyword thousands of times in order to position it.
Nowadays, I am not going to get a better position in the SERP by writing ten million times "Black Hat SEO". The keyword must be used, synonyms must be used and its semantic field must be used, but always applying logic.
If the algorithm detects that an article is over-optimised with too many keywordsThere is a good chance that it will penalise us. More and more natural language, more similar to oral language or to the language of our literature, is being rewarded. SEO language The days are numbered.
When it comes to writing, it's easy. Just keep the keyword in mind, but don't use it if you don't really need to.
Link farms
We've already told you about the link farms when I told you about my first SEO jobs. These are different websites or blogs that link together to help each other to rank each other.
The different pages receive links and give links at the same time, exchanging links even if the content is not of quality or is not related to their own.
For example, imagine I have a fashion shop and I link to a pet blog that also links to me and to a technology ecommerce that links to both fashion and pet blogs.
This is of no relevance to Google. And generally not for the user either.
Payment links
Of all the techniques of Black Hat SEO is the one most commonly used today and the one that continues to work. Above all, because it is very difficult for algorithms to discover it.
It is a evolution of link farms. In this case, you pay to place a link on a specific page that interests you due to its subject matter or relevance. Following the example of a fashion shop, we may be interested in having a link in Vogue or in the blog of a famous influencer.
To achieve this, we pay a certain amount to the blog or influencer. At first, Google would have no way of discovering whether the link was placed because they love our product or because we paid for it.
However, you have to be careful because there are several clues that can tip off Google. For example, if from one day to the next we have a lot of links on pages that have previously been suspected of selling links.
To this day, there are still many platforms to buy relevant linksHowever, if we want it to work, it is advisable to buy them progressively and not all at the same time. It is also necessary to maintain a consistent relationship between follow and nofollow links so that the algorithm does not become suspicious.
Hidden content
Hidden content is another technique of Black Hat SEO that has become outdated. It is a matter of putting elements for the algorithms to see that are, however, not visible to the user.
Related to the concept of Thin Content or content of little value, so that it is not visible, you can set the font to 0, the background colour, add a drop-down, etc.
Google hates this element because in its regulations it states that your bots should see the same as users. If we are caught showing something we don't want users to see, we will be removed from search results.
Private Blog Networks
This is another variant of link farms, which no longer works since the Penguin algorithm in 2017. Private Blog Networksalso known as PBNs, are a series of pages with a high domain authority that all offer links to a specific page.
In fact, there are companies that buy old domains with high authority to do this. When a website hires these PBNs they all link to it at the same time, which used to cause it to rise very quickly in the search results.
Over time they have adapted and, for example, they may publish it periodically to try to fool the algorithm. However, aspects such as the registration name of the domains can be key to uncovering the pie.
Cloaking or Doorway page
The aim is to generate a page for the Google bots completely different from what the user sees. Usability or anything that gives value to the user is not taken into account. When the user enters, there is nothing related to what they are looking for or there is no quality.
Since 2015 Google has been penalising pages that follow this technique which means camouflage in Spanish.
Spinning
Finally, I have to mention the spinning. In this case, it is about generating content automatically through software using other articles or a specific keyword as a basis.
Synonyms and automatically generated text are used, taking into account the semantic fieldsbut it does not have the meaning that a text created by a human being can have.
Fortunately, the Google algorithms are quicker to detect texts created with this software and remove them from their search results.
Ultimately, the Black Hat SEO techniques always have their days numbered. Google detects this and fixes it with its various updates, so when we make an article for positioning it is better to avoid traps and think about what is most important: to give value to the user.
