To remain the most popular search engine in the world, Google has to continuously update its algorithm to continue delivering users useful results.
To this end, Google also makes available Google Search Essentials, so everyone from web developers to SEO professionals knows the rules of the game.
Of course, there are plenty of people who want to win the game without following its rules.
The tactics they use are known as black hat SEO.
Black hat SEO gets its name from old cowboy movies where the bad guys wear a black hat.
Black hat SEO practitioners know the rules of search engine optimization and use that understanding to take shortcuts that aren’t exactly laid out in Google’s best practices.
This is in juxtaposition to white hat SEO practitioners who promote high-value content, and engage in deep keyword research to win in the SERPs.
Google is good at identifying and penalizing black hat SEO techniques, but that doesn’t stop people from trying them anyway. As technology develops, new techniques are invented, which push Google to intensify the fight against them.
Here are 13 black hat practices to avoid because they can land you an algorithmic or manual penalty.
Some of these you may do without intending to, so it’s good to familiarize yourself with black hat SEO to make sure you’re in the clear.
Black Hat Link Techniques
1. Buying Links
A high-quality, relevant link can drive traffic to your domain while telling Google’s algorithm that you’re a trustworthy source.
A good backlink can also help Google map your website so that it has a better idea of what you’re all about, making it easier to serve you up as a search result.
Buying a link, however, is against Google’s Search Essentials, and – according to Google – it doesn’t work.
If you’re caught, you could get an automatic and manual penalty that affects specific pages or, worse, the entire site.
Google tracks links that are likely to have been bought and those that have been earned.
Additionally, the sort of website that sells you a link is the sort of website you wouldn’t want to buy a link from because it is easier than you think for Google to identify unnatural patterns – even for Google’s own properties.
For this reason, Google created a form to help you disavow links.
This way, when you go through your backlinks, you can disentangle yourself from any undesirable domains.
2. PBNs
Image from author, November 2024
PBNs are websites that link to each other.
They used to be much more prevalent in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly among fan pages for TV shows, movies, musicians, etc.
It is considered a link scheme when it is designed to manipulate algorithms, and with current AI advancements, search engines are perfect for catching such patterns.
3. Comment Spam
Image from author, November 2024
You may be able to share a link to your website in the comments section of a website, but you should avoid doing so unless it’s relevant.
Otherwise, you risk being penalized for being a spammer, as using comments to build links is essentially not effective.
4. Footer Links
Image from author, November 2024
The footer is prime real estate for a link because footers appear on every website page.
If you’ve been adding footer links with commercial anchor text at scale to manipulate results, Google will likely be able to identify those and penalize you for it.
5. Hidden Links
Image from author, November 2024
You may think that you can hide a link in your website’s text or by having the link appear as the same color as the background, but Google will notice and penalize you for trying to game the system.
Additionally, if you include enough irrelevant links, you’ll give Google less reason to direct traffic to your target audience since you’ll be diluting your relevance.
Deceptively hidden links are a violation of Google’s guidelines. That means:
No hiding text behind an image.
No keeping text off-screen using CSS or JavaScript.
No using a font size of 0.
No making one little character, like a period, a link.
For the full list of unnatural link types, see this article.
Content Black Hat Techniques
6. AI-Generated Content At A Scale
With the rise of AI, chatbots producing large volumes of content has become easier than ever.
Google has updated its guidelines to address the use of AI-generated content at a scale and advises that it should be thoroughly reviewed and fact-checked to ensure accuracy and reliability.
This means the use of AI to mass-generate content without human oversight violates Google’s guidelines.
However, black hat SEO pros in the early days of AI exploited these technologies by creating large volumes of content without proper human supervision.
Consequently, many of these sites were removed from search results when Google updated its algorithm and detected AI-generated spam patterns.