What are some black hat SEO examples and some of the dangers of this strategy? Is it worth the risk?
Most likely you’re here because you want to get traffic to your website(s) and have been looking at some SEO strategies. So what’s the big deal with black hat stuff, and what are some black hat SEO examples that are common online and should you roll the dice by doing them?
Today I will share five examples and then give my view on the matter with some suggestions to do SEO the right way that brings long term traffic. So let’s get right into it!
1 – Link farming
A link farm is basically a group of websites that all artifically link to each other for the sole purpose of cheating the search engines, instead of people legitimately linking to other sites because they found it useful or relevant. They’re usually created by softwares, programs or even workers in third world countries.
Often the link quality is poor and because the congruencey between the sites is poor, this is very short lived as the search engine bots that crawl these websites will soon realise this and it could even sandbox your site. This means it can be knocked off the search engines for good with little change of returning, and it can take months to reverse this damage.
There’s more details about what constitutes a link farm on this Wikipedia page (these things are hardly bedtime reading though, FYI).
2 – Spam comments
You will usually see these on a blog or forum, they are generally non-sensical and they usually post their link in the comments a few times which is very kind of them! They may leave nice messages such as “hi, thank you post this write up, I told my friend John about this, and he said it will help him promote *insert link here* and in some cases the comments do look genuine.
The giveaway is the type of website they post (some blogs let you legitimately add your link in a certain section of your comment), if they are posting about pay day loans and you are running a home business blog, chances are it’s a spam comment and should be dropped like a hot potato! If you blog, use Akismet to block spam comments.
Instead of comment spamming, leave comments that take time to write and are specific to the blog post content will greatly increase your chances of getting comments approved on high end blogs. This is still a viable strategy for getting a small trickle of traffic to your website if you leave it in the comments, but in my personal view links in comments do not carry as much SEO value as they used to due to spammers.
3 – Keyword stuffing
Now come on are people STILL doing this one? That’s so 1999. Instead, aim for one main keyword to rank for and throw in a few related similar keywords as it’s possible to rank for more than keyword with your content, I have done it many times. The best way around this is to naturally insert your keywords into your content rather than trying to cram as many in as possible.
4 – Buying traffic
Again this is a pretty old strategy, yet there are companies out there still offering packages such as 5000 views on your YouTube video for $50. The only kicker is that most content is not ranked by how many people see your content, but how long they stay on the website. If someone visits your blog post or video and they leave within a few seconds, this can now actually hurt your rankings.
5 – Invisible text
This may be one that not many people know! In my view this is the most daft of the black hat SEO examples that I’ve come across. With invisible text a human can’t see it as the link may be intentionally concealed in a website background (and sometimes in the coding of the website, in the past at least), however a search engine bot will easily pick this up as they aim to read the entire content of the website.
There is a short article on invisible text on Google’s webmaster support page here.
If you want more black hat SEO examples, you can get some more details on the right and wrong strategies straight from the horses’ mouth via Google’s Webmasters YouTube channel. Most of the training is created by Matt Cutts, who was head of the spam team at Google until 2015. Also check out my free training page for more SEO training and other traffic generation strategies.
-Seb Brantigan
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Skype: seb.brantigan
