What Are The Top 36 Black Hat SEO Tactics?

The Top 36 Black Hat SEO Tactics & Some You Used, or Likely Using

Black hat SEO tactics manipulate search engine algorithms for quick wins, but they can severely damage your website in the long run. Here’s a long blog on 36 examples and explanations. Here I am proving a point. The list is far greater and there’s lots of forums with how to’s. I have created a list to show I am aware of what is black hat SEO and also how to spot it. In the long list, there are five tactics you might unknowingly be using, or that your marketing team may not be aware of.

If I was going to use an analogy, black hat SEO is like an alchemist making gold. While it might appear valuable in the short term, typically it reduces to something putrid, in the short to medium term. I’ve seen black hat SEO with SME startups and even former angel-funded ventures: using short-term, unsustainable techniques to recoup investments on flawed business ideas or compensate for poor leadership. Many black hat SEO tactics I frequently see are used in the affiliate marketing white brand or branded websites, plus hospitality, restaurant, and travel verticals. Also influencer websites and profiles.

While it is tempting to use black-hat SEO, these tactics can severely damage your website’s reputation and search ranking. Even if you’ve moved on from your website or target audience, it’s best to sell the business ethically rather than resorting to these dark practices.

Black Hat SEO: Risking Reputation and Legal Trouble

Black hat SEO prioritises short-term gains over user experience and often violates search engine guidelines. Getting caught can result in a Google manual action, penalising your website.

Important Note: In extreme cases, using black hat techniques like technical SEO manipulation or negative SEO could lead to legal action, including lawsuits or even imprisonment. Don’t say you’ve not been warned. Why do they do this shady stuff? Well, someone wants something fast, doesn’t want to do the hard, long walk and there’s someone willing to sell you the quick ride to the top, but doesn’t mention the hard drop on the other side. It’s also worth noting, it’s not their business. They take the money and leave. Typically business owners, well or bad intentioned reap the disadvantages later.

Here’s a breakdown of what makes black hat SEO, black hat. There’s three main points, deception, unethical and manipulation. We’ll then get on to the basic techniques.

• Deception: Black hat SEO techniques frequently deceive search engines by creating content or structures that aren’t intended for real users. This could involve keyword stuffing, hidden text, or cloaking (showing different content to search engines and users).
  
  There are a lot of ‘trusted’ websites which sadly use ‘dark patterns’. Dark patterns are essentially deceptive tricks websites and apps use to manipulate you into making decisions that benefit the business, not necessarily you. They often prey on common user behaviours or create a sense of urgency or scarcity to nudge you in a particular direction. Here are some examples of dark patterns you might encounter:
  
  • Forced continuity: You sign up for a free trial of a service, but cancelling later turns out to be a maze of clicks and hidden options.
    
  • Sneak into basket: An item you browsed mysteriously appears in your shopping cart at checkout, hoping you won’t notice or remove it. A certain huge trader uses this with subscriptions :D.
    
  • Confirm shaming: When you try to unsubscribe from emails, you’re bombarded with guilt-trippy messages like “Are you sure you don’t want to miss out on exclusive offers?”
    
  • Price comparison prevention: Confusing pricing structures or deliberately omitting competitor prices to make their own deals seem more attractive.
    
  • Disguised ads: Ads cleverly designed to look like regular website content, tricking you into clicking on them unintentionally.
    
• Manipulation: Black hat SEO hinges on manipulating search engine algorithms through practices like buying backlinks or creating private link networks (PBNs). These tactics aim to trick the algorithm into thinking a website is more relevant than it actually is.
  
• Unethical: Black hat SEO goes against the established guidelines set by search engines like Google. Engaging in these practices can be seen as unethical as it disrupts the intended function of search engines, which is to provide users with the most relevant and useful results.

Risks of Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO might seem tempting for a quick rankings boost, but it carries significant risk:

• Penalties: Search engines can penalise websites that use black hat tactics, leading to a significant drop in rankings or even complete removal from search results. Typically this will be via a manual action.
• Unsustainable: Black hat SEO results aren’t sustainable. Search engines constantly update their algorithms, and tactics that work today might get penalised tomorrow.
• Damaged Reputation: Being caught using black hat SEO can damage your website’s reputation and erode user trust. Depending how far you go with black hat SEO, you could find yourself with a civil or criminal action lawsuit.

Why do White Hat SEO

Instead of black hat SEO, there are white hat SEO practices. White hat SEO involves creating high-quality content, building backlinks organically, and optimising your website for a positive user experience. These strategies take time and effort, but they lead to sustainable success in search rankings and build trust with your audience.

The A-Z of 36 Black Hat SEO Tactics

BLACK HAT SEO ON PAGE AND CONTENT TACTIC EXAMPLES

1. Keyword Stuffing: Unnaturally cramming keywords into content for ranking purposes. It can also use the LSI school of content creation. Here’s an example of how NOT to optimise your content like a keyword stuffed turkey …
   
   Do NOT: Best running shoes ever, buy running shoes online, running shoes for sale, comfortable running shoes, fastest running shoes.
   
   This sentence is nonsensical and stuffed with keywords in an unnatural way. It wouldn’t be helpful to users and would likely be flagged by search engines.
   
   DO: In this article, we’ll explore the features of the best running shoes for different types of runners. Whether you’re a beginner looking for comfort or a seasoned athlete seeking speed, we’ll help you find the perfect pair to elevate your running experience.
   
2. Article Spinning: Automatically rewriting existing content to create thin, duplicate content. Better articles may also be used with this to disrupt pillar landing pages. We often see this used by so called ‘White Hat SEOers’, who have a lazy content writing team. To make sure you do not fall foul of this, use ‘plagiarism tools’.
   
   Original Text:
   Title: The Many Benefits of Using a Backpack
   Body: Backpacks are a versatile and convenient way to carry your belongings. They come in a variety of sizes and styles to suit your needs, whether you’re a student, hiker, or traveler. Backpacks can help improve your posture, distribute weight evenly, and keep your hands free.
   
   Spun ‘Copied/Plagiarised’ Text:
   Title: Enhance Your Day with a Handy Knapsack
   Body: Knapsacks, those trusty companions, offer a multitude of advantages for carrying your stuff. Available in a diverse range of dimensions and designs to suit your requirements, knapsacks are perfect for students, adventurers, or globetrotters alike. Knapsacks can promote better posture, ensure balanced weight distribution, and allow for free hand movement.
   
   This spun text uses synonyms for some words (backpack = knapsack, benefits = advantages, etc.) and changes the sentence structure slightly. However, it reads awkwardly and doesn’t offer any new information.
   
   Here’s why article spinning is generally a bad idea: Low Quality: Spun content is often grammatically incorrect and unnatural-sounding, which can turn off readers. Not Search Engine Friendly: Search engines like Google are getting better at detecting spun content and may penalise your website. Since Google’s Fred update, and now that SGE is running in the background, this content should be avoided. Unethical: Spinning content from someone else’s work is a form of plagiarism.
   
3. Content Automation: Relying on AI to generate content without human oversight or editing. There are AI tools that can churn out vast quantities of articles on a specific topic. These articles are typically thin, low-quality, and full of fluff, offering no real value to readers. Examples include Article Forge and Rytr.
   
4. Cloaking: Showing different content to search engines and users typically using javascript :D, user agent detection, IP address targeting, and dns level cloaking. Some ideas are actually quite inventive – and unethical. You often find javascript black hat SEO with badly developed websites. Here’s a run down of sites and issues I have seen and diagnosed with black hat SEO.
   
   • User-Agent Detection:
     Method: The server checks the “user-agent” string in the request header. This string identifies the software making the request, and search engines have specific user-agent strings for their crawlers. How it works: If the user-agent string indicates a search engine crawler, the server delivers a different version of the webpage packed with relevant keywords and optimised for search ranking. For human visitors, the server shows the intended content.
     
   • IP Address Targeting:
     Method: The server identifies the IP address making the request. Some black hats might compile lists of known search engine crawler IP addresses. How it works: If the request comes from a known search engine crawler IP, the server delivers the SEO-optimised content. Otherwise, the user sees the intended content.
     
   • Javascript Rendering
     Method: The server delivers a page with minimal content initially, and Javascript code dynamically loads the actual content for human visitors.
     How it works: Search engine crawlers might not execute Javascript effectively, so they only see the minimal content, which can be stuffed with keywords. Human visitors see the full content loaded by Javascript.
     
   • DNS-Level Cloaking:
     Method: This is a more advanced technique involving manipulating the Domain Name System (DNS) to deliver different content based on the visitor’s IP address.
     
     How it works: The server can be configured to point the same domain name to different IP addresses depending on the visitor. One IP might serve the SEO-optimised content for search engines, while another serves the intended content for human visitors.
     
5. Hidden Text/Links: Embedding invisible text or links on a page. This can happen even with ‘White Hat SEO’ websites. Be careful of your CSS over the entire website. You might find you have hidden text and links and do not know it!
   
   True Story: In March, 2024 I had to access an ‘SEO agency’ website and come back with recommendations how to improve it. I used no tools in the audit, other than a few browser extensions. In the audit I saw there was various tricks such as hidden text and links, plus over spamming / over optimising titles. I submitted this in the ‘report’. Obviously I didn’t get to the next phase.
   
   Here’s a few tricks black hat SEO agencies and individuals employ.
   
   • Font Manipulation:
     • Method: Text color is set to match the background color (white text on white background, black text on black background). This makes the text invisible to users but still readable by search engines.
     • Look out for: Large blocks of text or areas where the text seems oddly blurry or faded, especially if it coincides with keyword phrases.
       
   • Font Size Trickery:
     • Method: Setting the font size to zero hides the text completely but search engines can still detect it.
     • Look out for: Areas on the page where you can select text with your cursor even though you can’t see anything.
       
   • CSS Positioning:
     • Method: Using CSS styles, the text is positioned off-screen (e.g., way above the fold or to the side). It’s invisible to users but search engines can still see it.
     • Look out for: Source code inspection for unusual CSS styles applied to large chunks of text, especially if they seem nonsensical for layout purposes.
       
   • Image Text Replacement:
     • Method: Replacing image alt text with keyword-stuffed text. Alt text is meant to describe the image for visually impaired users and accessibility purposes, but black hats exploit it for SEO.
     • Look out for: Images with oddly specific or generic alt text that doesn’t seem relevant to the actual image content.
       
   • Link Cloaking:
     • Method: Hiding actual links behind invisible text or images. Users wouldn’t know they’re clicking a link.
     • Look out for: Hovering over suspicious areas to see if a link tooltip appears, even if there’s no visible text or image.
       
6. Doorway Pages: What are doorway pages? They are temporary webpages designed to rank highly for specific keywords. They are essentially filler pages with minimal content, heavily optimised for those keywords. Once a user clicks on a doorway page in search results, they are typically redirected to a different, deeper page on the website (often the actual target landing page). Again this technique sometimes falls on to White Hat SEO territory with offer geological pages which are turned on and off – especially for sales or particular days. Be careful how you deploy these pages and how you do redirects.
   
   • Black Hat SEO with Doorway Pages:
     Keyword Targeting: Black hat SEOs create multiple doorway pages targeting a vast number of long-tail keywords to increase their chances of ranking for various searches.
     Content Deception: The doorway page content itself might be irrelevant or nonsensical, focusing solely on keyword stuffing instead of providing valuable information.
     
   • Sneaky Redirects: Redirects to the target page can be immediate or use sneaky tactics like meta refreshes that happen after a short delay, further deceiving users.
   • Normal Use vs. Black Hat:
   • There can be a fine line between legitimate use and black hat SEO with doorway pages.
     
     Here’s how normal use can be misinterpreted:
     
   • Location-Specific Landing Pages: A business might create different landing pages optimised for various city locations. While this can be a good practice for targeting local SEO, if the pages are thin on content and primarily keyword-stuffed, it might be seen as black hat.
     
   • Dynamic Content Delivery: Some websites personalise content based on user location or search query. While this can be a great user experience, if the personalized pages are minimal and solely focused on keywords for that specific search, it could raise red flags for search engines.
     
   • The Key Distinction: The key difference between legitimate use and black hat SEO lies in the intent and user experience.
     
   • White Hat Approach: Focuses on creating informative and valuable landing pages optimised for relevant keywords but also providing a good user experience with the intended content.
     
   • Black Hat Approach: Prioritises manipulating search rankings with minimal or irrelevant content on doorway pages, tricking users into clicking through to the intended page.
     
7. Scraped Content: Stealing content from other websites and posting it as your own. Tools like Black Widow make this very easy to accomplish. The software is a legitimate software. It’s a site ripper and downloader that allows you to download website content. While it can be used for legitimate purposes like backing up personal websites, it can also be misused for content scraping.
   
   Scraped and low quality content is often used in TV and movie genre especially for streamed programs. You will find the same lists published and republished, often on ‘legitimate’ websites.
   
8. Misleading Content: Creating content that doesn’t fulfil user intent or is factually incorrect. This can happen with a lot of dating, license code, game cheats websites
   
9. Bait-and-Switch Content: Promising something in the title/meta description but delivering irrelevant content. Very similar to misleading content above. But this tactic is ingenious – it’s actually a hustle! Here’s how it works.
   
   • The Bait:
     Keyword Targeting: Black hats identify popular keywords with high search volume. Compelling Titles & Descriptions: They craft attention-grabbing titles and meta descriptions that promise valuable information or solutions related to those keywords. Initial Content: The initial content on the webpage might be relevant to the keywords and might even be high-quality (stolen or quickly written). This initial content acts as the “bait” to attract users and search engines.
     
   • The Switch:
     Content Replacement: Once the webpage gains traction in search rankings and attracts users, the black hat SEOer replaces the initial content. Irrelevant Content: The replacement content can be completely unrelated to the original topic or keywords. It might be thin, low-quality content, advertisements, or even lead to a different website altogether.
     
   • Why Black Hats Do It:
   • Short-Term Ranking Boost and commissions. The initial high-quality content helps the page rank well for targeted keywords, however if planned out over several campaigns you get the next part…
   • Exploiting Inbound Links: Once ranked well, the page might attract backlinks from other websites who haven’t yet seen the content switch. These backlinks further boost SEO score and of course, taking place over various campaigns can be very lucrative.
     
   • Impact on Users and Search Engines:
     User Frustration: Users who click through expecting valuable information based on the title and description are met with disappointment and irrelevant content. Quite often this happens with ‘recipes’ and ‘how to’ content.
   • Deception of Search Engines: Search engines aim to provide users with relevant results. Bait-and-switch tactics undermine this goal.
     
10. Over-Optimization for a Single Keyword: Focusing on one keyword at the expense of natural language. This falls into then more categories of spamming and other tactics. This is often the first step of the slippery slope of many a black-hat SEO professional.

BLACK HAT OFFSITE SEO + LINKING TACTIC EXAMPLES

11. Directory Submission Spam: Submitting your website to irrelevant or low-quality directories. Gone are the days of the early 2000’s.
    
12. Buying Backlinks: Paying for links from other websites, regardless of quality or relevance.
    
13. Link Schemes: Participating in link exchanges or other artificial link-building methods.
    
14. Private Blog Networks (PBNs): Creating networks of websites solely for backlinking to your own site.
    
15. Comment Spam: Posting irrelevant or promotional comments on blogs and forums typically with a link back to your own or someone else’s website
    
16. Guest Posting on Low-Quality Sites: Guest blogging on websites with poor reputation or unrelated niches.
    
17. Forum Spam: Creating multiple accounts just to leave promotional links on forums.
    
18. Broken Link Building: Intentionally linking to broken pages to get backlinks when they’re fixed.
    
19. Link Manipulation in Guest Posts: Inserting excessive anchor text with keywords in guest posts.
    
20. Sneaky Redirects: Redirecting users to a different page than they intended.

BLACKHAT TECHNICAL SEO EXAMPLES

21. Keyword Stuffing in Meta Tags: Overusing keywords in title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags.
    
22. Duplicate Meta Descriptions/Title Tags: Using the same descriptions/tags for multiple pages.
    
23. Missing or Thin Content: Pages with minimal content or no content at all. Thin content refers to website content that offers little to no value to visitors. It essentially fails to fulfil the purpose of a webpage, which is to inform, educate, entertain, or convert the user in some way.
    
    Here’s what makes content “thin”:
    • Lack of Depth: Thin content often skims the surface of a topic, providing minimal information that doesn’t satisfy the user’s search intent. Imagine a blog post on “baking a cake” that only lists the ingredients without any instructions. That’s thin content.
    • Short Length: While word count isn’t the sole indicator, thin content tends to be very short. It might just be a paragraph or two, lacking the comprehensiveness needed to cover a topic adequately.
    • Poor Quality: Thin content can be poorly written, riddled with grammatical errors, or just factually incorrect. It might also be scraped content, meaning it’s been copied from another source without adding any original value.
    • Keyword Stuffing: Sometimes thin content is created around a specific keyword, but the keyword is unnaturally crammed into the text in an attempt to rank higher in search results. This can be off-putting for users and doesn’t improve the content’s quality.
      
24. Slow Loading Speed: Having a website that takes too long to load. Otherwise known as you need to pay the website developer’s invoice. Only kidding. Or am I?
    
25. Mobile-Unfriendly Design: Not having a website optimised for mobile devices – typically using fixed length tables. You might come across this with Dreamweaver based web development, plus many a developer who says they are an SEO expert. Here’s things typically found on these newly built and legacy websites that often have a lot of black hat SEO development, but at the time it may have been unintentional.
    
    Here’s some more
    • Tiny Text: Text that’s too small to read comfortably on a small screen. You’ll find yourself zooming in and out constantly, ruining the browsing experience.
    • Non-Responsive Images: Images that appear in their full desktop size on a mobile screen. This can lead to awkward scrolling or having to pinch and zoom to see the whole image.
    • Flash Elements: Websites that rely on Flash for animations or interactivity are a no-go on mobile devices. Flash isn’t supported and will leave those sections blank or non-functional.
    • Unclickable Buttons: Buttons that are too small or close together, making them difficult to tap accurately with your finger. Imagine trying to checkout on a shopping website and accidentally adding another item because the buttons were too close! This often comes up in search console – pay attention to the warning.
    • Horizontal Scrolling: Having to scroll sideways to see the entire content of a webpage. This is unnatural on a mobile device and should be avoided by using responsive design techniques.
    • Pop-Ups That Block Content: Large pop-up windows that take over the entire screen on mobile, making it impossible to see the content behind them. This is a major frustration for users and can lead to them abandoning the website altogether.
    • Forms Requiring Extensive Typing: Lengthy forms with small text boxes can be a nightmare to fill out on a touch screen.
    • Lack of Mobile Navigation: Websites designed for desktops might have complex menus that don’t translate well to mobile. A mobile-friendly site should have a simple and easy-to-use navigation menu optimised for touch input.
      
26. Improper Internal Linking: Not having a well-structured internal linking strategy. Read, the intern has decided to make spammy keyword links per page, including links to another page with the keyword associated with the page it’s linking from.
    
27. Rich Snippet Markup Spam: Using schema markup incorrectly to mislead search engines. Events and Job sites, know this spam well.
    
28. Automated Queries to Google: Using bots or scripts to bombard search engines with requests thus increasing ‘search interest’. This can inflate SEO PPC prices, or fool affiliate companies to pay more for a certain product advertised per 1000 on a website.

NEGATIVE SEO – TARGETING COMPETITORS

29. Hacking a Competitor’s Website: Tampering with a competitor’s site to hurt their ranking. Typically using hack-kits for a particular CMS.
    
30. Building Spammy Links to a Competitor’s Site: Trying to get a competitor penalised with low-quality backlinks, typically using directory submissions. This is quite often the most frequently used tactic.
    
31. Mass Reporting a Competitor to Search Engines: Falsely reporting a competitor for violations.
    
32. Fake Reviews and Testimonials: Posting fabricated reviews to boost reputation – yep a lot of this happens. Typically anyone in SEO can plainly see this happening on Google Maps, Yelp, IMDB, Trust Pilot, Indeed and TripAdvisor.
    
33. Website Spoofing: Creating a website that imitates a legitimate one typically to steal information and give a negative brand experience. Typically information taken in this manner ends up on the dark web.
    
34. Spammy Social Media Activity: Creating fake social media accounts or using them for aggressive promotion – yep, a lot of this happens.
    
35. Malvertising: Distributing malicious ads through your website and/or products which pretend to do good (anti virus or malware) but actually are trojans.
    
36. Cloaking Based on User Agent: Showing different content depending on the device used.

The Mega Conclusion: Black Hat SEO vs White Hat SEO – A Balancing Act

This article has comprehensively explored the world of SEO, diving deep into the ethical (white hat) and unethical (black hat) practices used to improve website ranking in search results.

Here’s a breakdown of the key takeaways:

• Black Hat SEO:
  • Focuses on manipulating search engine algorithms for short-term gains through deceptive tactics.
  • Examples include keyword stuffing, hidden text, buying backlinks, and creating doorway pages.
  • Risks include penalties from search engines, damaged reputation, and unsustainable results.
    
• White Hat SEO:
  • Involves creating high-quality content, building backlinks organically, and optimizing your website for a positive user experience.
  • Takes time and effort but leads to sustainable success and builds trust with your audience.

Conclusion: The Gray Area: The world of Angel Funded SME’s to burn, start-ups & HIPPOs

It’s important to acknowledge the blurry lines between these two approaches. Sometimes, well-intentioned SEO practices by inexperienced individuals can unintentionally border on black hat SEO territory. Here’s where things get tricky, especially for startups and angel-funded SMEs with limited marketing resources. This is what happens

• Inexperienced Teams: A lack of SEO knowledge, or avoiding it as a risk will lead to unknowingly employing black hat tactics.
• Pressure for Results: The pressure to achieve quick results can tempt businesses towards black hat techniques. This happens in Angel investor SMEs and start-ups, using all techniques to get back funding, while burning the business
• Focus on Rankings over User Experience: Prioritising ranking over user experience is a red flag.

Choosing the Right Path:

While black hat SEO might offer a temporary ranking boost, the risks far outweigh the rewards if you are serious about your business.

Remember:

• Focus on creating high-quality content that provides value to your audience.
• Build backlinks organically through genuine relationships and guest posting on relevant websites.
• Prioritise user experience by ensuring your website is fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate.

By following these principles, you can achieve sustainable SEO success without resorting to black hat tactics.

Sign off note:

Certain large companies still use, buy and expand on false reviews, click throughs and traffic, and employ dark patterns. So if you use black hat SEO, know that you’re in good company with market leaders, known for their sinister business practices, but few people dare to call them out. As Google values more experience as a ‘ranking factor’ for some time the huge amount of local SEO spamming on Google Maps resulted in a radical ‘spam’ clampdown. However, Google handed over a lot of the control for legitimate reviews to be flagged as spam, thus unbalancing fair criticism. As everyone, including Google knows, that it’s easier to maintain a status quo, boost the happy go lucky reviews and thin out the negative ones.