What is Black Hat SEO?

There are a lot of terms that get thrown around when talking about SEO, but understanding and identifying what qualifies as "black hat SEO" might be one of the most important things for a website owner to do. Black hat SEO techniques and those who practice them have given other SEO professionals and the industry as a whole a bad reputation. Those who practice "white hat SEO," the efforts sanctioned by the search engines, find themselves fighting an uphill battle against their less-scrupulous brethren. In the end, however, white hat efforts are more effective.



An SEO technique that gets slapped with the black hat label is anything that is designed to trick the search engines to artificially boost search rankings. These methods usually produce quick, yet meaningless results that could result in a website getting red flagged by the search engines and removed from their results entirely.



Here are a few black hat SEO techniques all website owners should steer clear of:



Splogging

A moniker for spam and blogging, splogging involves take previously published content (usually from another author) and republishing it. Then the blog is loaded down with links and ads that the blogger gets paid for hosting. With no original content and an overload of links, these blogs are of no use to anyone.



Automation

Automation software is designed to leave generic comments on blogs in order to post a link to another (and usually irrelevant) website. Everyone has come across comments like, "Thanks for the great post," "Very helpful and interesting," "Wow! Good information!" While some may be honest compliments, blog owners shouldn’t always believe it. Using this type of software for a website’s SEO efforts can get a company user name quickly placed on the blog’s spammer list, making sure that even if they tried to post a valid comment, it would get denied.



Link Exchanges

Sometimes these can be naturally occurring, usually when company A does business with company B and is pleased with the results, so company A does a write-up about it. In turn, Company B does the same thing. It can work as good promotion for both companies. But link exchanges are a slippery slope to black hat territory when company A starts linking to other companies that have nothing to do with their industry or consumer base. Even if Company A and Company Q do have something in common, if there is no real reason to have the link exchange, search engines are going to notice and take it into account.



Article Blasting

It can be a little daunting when a website realizes how much content it should be producing to help with the SEO efforts. The easy and quick route would be to post the same article to a dozen different submission sites. But many article directories are aware that authors are trying to do this and require a guarantee that they won’t publish the same piece on another site for a set amount of time. If an author gets caught, their authorship at one or more of those sites can be revoked.



These are not all of the black hat SEO techniques being practiced, but they are some of the most common. Websites are responsible for the methods used to promote their website, whether they are using an outside source or handling it all in-house. Black hat SEO techniques almost always lead to the flagging of a website by the search engines. They may produce quick results, but there is very little long-term value to them. They will only damage the reputation of the website and the company.