What is Black Hat SEO in Short?

What is Black Hat SEO?

It is the use of strategies to increase search engine rankings that break search engine guidelines and rules.

This type of optimization can be against a search engine’s terms of the agreement, though it might not always be.

A person practising black hat SEO has no regard for what is known as “white hat” or ethical SEO practices,

and instead works with spammy techniques that do not benefit the search engine users.

This can include tactics such as keyword stuffing, cloaking or sneaky redirects, hidden text and doorway pages.

Not all of these techniques are necessarily bad, but some definitely are.

Cloaking is an example of a tactic that may be considered black hat SEO.

Cloaking is when a web page delivers one type of content to the search engine crawlers while serving completely different content to the actual human users.

Doorway pages are another example of these tactics.

These are landing pages created with the intent to rank highly on search engines, but have no real purpose other than this.

The use of hidden text and links is another tactic that can be considered spammy and against the search engine guidelines and rules.

Google is an example of a search engine that prohibits all of these types of methods in their webmaster guidelines.

Google also works to eliminate any websites that it finds using black hat SEO tactics from its index,

which makes the site and the owner of that site less visible to people using Google.

I hope this short answer has been insightful and that you have a greater understanding of black hat SEO.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss something related to this topic feel free to leave a comment below. Thanks for reading!

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