Was ist Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO refers to unethical and manipulative practices used to improve a site’s search engine rankings. These practices violate search engine guidelines and can lead to penalties, including loss of rankings and removal from search engine results pages.
Black hat SEO is a general term for multiple unethical SEO practices, including cloaking, paid links, and keyword stuffing. Private blog networks, low-quality content, spun articles, sneaky redirects, doorway pages, and link farms are additional examples of black hat SEO techniques.
Black hat SEO is the opposite of white hat SEO, which refers to search engine optimization (SEO) practices that comply with search engine guidelines.
Importance of Black Hat SEO
Some black hat SEO techniques work, while others do not. The ease with which search engines can detect them also differs. Search engines can identify some very quickly, while others may take some time to be uncovered.
In either case, all forms of black hat SEO will get you penalized. In the case of Google, a human reviewer will manually assess the affected webpage and issue a manual action penalty if they discover the page is involved in activities that violate Google’s Search Essentials guidelines.
Once the reviewer issues the manual actions penalty, Google demotes the site’s rankings and may remove it altogether. This is called deindexing.
Sites issued with a manual action penalty must clean up whatever caused the penalty and file a reconsideration request. However, there is no guarantee that Google will lift the penalty or that the site will recover its previous rankings once the penalty is lifted.
To prevent such a problem, it is better to avoid black hat SEO and focus on white hat SEO instead. While white hat SEO typically takes longer and may require more work, it will ultimately yield results.
On the other hand, black hat SEO may give quick results but will be penalized sooner or later. This makes black hat SEO unreliable for growing your blog and traffic.
16 Common Black Hat SEO Techniques
Black hat SEO is a general term for every SEO technique created to manipulate search results pages. These techniques generally violate search engine guidelines, even if the search engine does not explicitly state such. Search engines typically update their spam policies and guidelines to include additional techniques.
1 Türseite
EIN doorway page is a webpage designed to rank for specific Schlüsselwörter. It then redirects visitors who click on it to a separate page containing entirely different content. Malicious bloggers usually create many doorway pages, with each one targeting a different keyword or phrase.
2 Google-Bombenanschlag
Google bombing or Googlewashing is the practice of optimizing a webpage to rank for an unrelated term on Google results pages. It is called link bombing when it occurs on other search engines and is often used for humorous or political purposes.
Google bombing is typically executed by creating or encouraging multiple bloggers to create backlinks with the same anchor text. Once that happens, the site being linked to will rank for the anchor text on search results pages.
3 Aggressive Link Exchanges
EIN link exchange occurs when two or more sites agree to link to each other to boost their backlink profiles. While it is generally considered a white hat SEO technique, it can become black hat when done aggressively or when irrelevant and low-quality content links to one another.
4 Aggressive Reciprocal Linking
EIN reciprocal link occurs when two sites link to one another. It is a white hat SEO technique and an excellent method of building backlinks. However, it can become a black hat link building technique when done aggressively or when irrelevant and low-quality sites begin to link to one another.
5 Link Farm
EIN link farm is a group of websites created solely to link to one another. They are often automated, and the sites involved often have little to no valuable content. Link farms exist only to manipulate search engines and boost the rankings of all the sites on the farm.
6 Privates Blog-Netzwerk (PBN)
EIN private blog network (PBN) is a group of websites created to link to a target site. The sites in the network are often owned by the same person or entity. However, unlike a link farm, the sites in the network only link to the target site. They do not link to themselves, and the target site does not link to them either.
7 Link-Schema
EIN link scheme refers to multiple black hat link building techniques. The specifics vary, but they are all executed to manipulate search engine rankings and make a site rank higher than it usually should.
Link farms, paid links, automated linking, private blog networks, aggressive link exchanges, and reciprocal linking are all link schemes. In fact, any black hat SEO technique that manipulates backlinks to increase rankings can be considered a link scheme.
8 Link-Spam
Link spam is sometimes used as another name for a link scheme. However, it may also refer to the black hat link building practice of posting irrelevant or excessive links in the comment section of an online forum or similar platform.
Link spam is typically executed using automated bots that post links across multiple sites. These bots may generate low-quality content to accompany the links. However, the content and link are usually irrelevant to the post.
9 Hidden Content
Hidden content involves placing text or links in hidden locations on a webpage. It is often done using techniques such as setting the text color to match the background or positioning the text off-screen.
Hidden text and links are invisible to human visitors but visible to search engine crawlers. They are typically stuffed with keywords that the blogger wants the page to rank for.
10 Paid Links
EIN paid link is a backlink acquired in exchange for payment, either in money or other service of value. Paid links are often obtained through private agreements or link-selling networks. Undeclared ads may also be considered paid links.
11 Artikelspinnen
Artikel dreht sich is the practice of rewriting someone else’s content and passing it off as yours. It is often automated using writing software but may also be done manually.
The level of rewriting differs between writers. However, it is often basic, with the writer replacing words with synonyms and rephrasing sentences so that they pass plagiarism checks.
12 Gekratzter Inhalt
Scraped content involves copying content from other websites and republishing it without permission. It is often done using automated tools that copy and publish the post to the scraper’s site. Some scrapers may also spin the article to avoid detection.
13 Tarnung
Tarnung is the practice of showing different content to humans and search engines. For example, a site might show search engine crawlers a webpage about “yoga poses” but then show visitors that arrive on the page a betting platform.
Cloaking is often executed using JavScript, server-side scripts, or dynamic content delivery. These scripts detect the browser’s user agent and proceed to serve them different content, depending on whether they are humans or a search engine bot.
14 Keyword-Stuffing
Keyword-Stuffing is the practice of excessively repeating the same keyword or phrase. The repeated content is included in the webpage’s visible content, headings, meta tags, image title, and alt text.
The goal is to make the keywords appear so often that search engines rank them for that keyword. Malicious bloggers typically use keyword stuffing with other black hat SEO techniques like hidden text.
15 Reiner Spam
Pure spam is the aggressive use of black hat SEO techniques like cloaking, keyword stuffing, and scraping. While sites could use these individual techniques, some use them aggressively and at scale.
It is common for malicious bloggers to automate their pure spam black hat techniques. Such sites typically want to get as much traffic and revenue from such techniques as possible before they are detected and penalized by Google.
16 Site Reputation Abuse
Site reputation abuse is the practice of exploiting the authority of a high-ranking site. For instance, a small ecommerce business publishes an article on a large site. This article then contains links that lead to products sold on the ecommerce site.
While Google is not against guest posts, sponsored posts, and partnerships, it considers such practices as site reputation abuse if the resulting content is intended to take advantage of the larger site’s authority.