Black Hat SEO Is Still Effective For Ranking Pages But Unreliable
Black hat SEO is the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics to manipulate search engines to rank a page higher in SERP most time not obeying search engine guidelines.
In most cases, black hat SEO does not focus on satisfying human readers but manipulating search engines.
The essence of guidelines set by major search engines like Google is aimed at helping readers find answers they seek for.
But when you ignore answering questions but apply black hat tricks, user experience is affected negatively.
There is this common notion that black hat SEO is dead.
I can categorically tell you that it is still active and remains powerful. What is common is that Google is getting better at spotting sites that use black hat techniques to rank higher in SERP.
So even though black hat SEO can help your page rank higher within a short period of time, it is not a long term strategy for ranking.
Most black hat ranking techniques will either affect your site generally that you rank low in serp or in extreme cases get your site deindexed from search engine.
White hat SEO strategy remains the best way to rank your page because the ranking and free traffic keeps coming in for a long time.
Applying all optimization techniques according to Google’s guideline keeps your site in their good books.
Black hat techniques get your domain blacklisted and deindexed.
So while black hat SEO is still effective and is still being used to rank pages, you cannot rely on it as a long term strategy.
8 Common Black Hat SEO Strategies
- Link Blasting
This is a process you automate your link building process. When your link pop up in thousands of place at same time, it sends a wrong signal to Google.
You can get de-indexed for this technique.
- Comment Blasting
Otherwise known as comment spamming, this is a black hat SEO technique where you automate your blog commenting process.
With a software, you massive leave comments in thousands of pages with your link with words link “Nice Post, keep it up”.
This is seen by Google as a black hat technique and will affect your ranking negatively.
- Paid Links
Paid links is another black hat SEO trick that can get your site de-indexed fast from Google SERP.
Once they realize that you pay for links, your site is immediately blacklisted. Your links are supposed to be natural and not manually done.
- PBN
Otherwise known as private blog network – this is a process where you buy expired domains with some page rank and good back links.
You don’t have to go through the process of building backlinks for these domains and you get a couple of them and insert your links into them as a link building technique.
Google has gotten better at spotting PBNs and delisting them from ranking.
- Duplicate Contents
This is a process where you copy other people’s work and publish them on your site as yours so as to increase page count.
While Google has no specific penalty for duplicate contents, it prefers to rank the original page higher than copied pages.
Besides, your site can be taken down entirely if there are DCMA complaints about it.
If when not taken down, when they are more duplicate pages on your site than original content, Google gives your site low rating.
Low rating means low ranking.
- Article Spinning
This is duplicate content taken to another level – a black hat SEO trick where you keep spinning a particular article over and over just to create multiple pages.
What makes this technique so bad is that user experience is negatively impacted which makes Google look bad when they rank you.
So I believe this technique will affect your ranking negatively.
- Doorway Pages
You create a page and optimize it to trick search engines into ranking it high. When visitors click on your link, they are redirected to an unrelated page.
This brings about bad user experience and search engines don’t like this.
- Keyword Stuffing
Because you read that bots uses keywords to rank pages, you now fill your contents with your target keyword in an unnatural way.
Most times contents that are built this way makes no sense to users and does not answer their question.
These are pages that are built to manipulate search engines and not for humans.
They will affect your ranking negatively and ultimately get you deindexed from SERP.
What You Need To Understand About Search Engines
Major search engines like Google are in the business of providing users answers to their queries.
When they don’t do a good job of ranking quality pages, it makes them look bad and affect their business negatively.
They wouldn’t want you to make them look bad so it’s important for them that they spot pages ranked with black hat techniques and take them off their search result.
So if you really want to rank in Google for long, I recommend that you stick to white hat SEO.
Black hat SEO though still effective is never a reliable way to rank a page for long time.
