Black Hat SEO

There are two ways to do SEO: white hat SEO (ethical practices) and black hat SEO (unethical practices). Black hat SEO is a set of unethical practices that go against the rules set by Google and other search engines. Although black hat SEO can help rank a website higher in the SERPs in the short term, it can result in the website being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites, as per the Google and Bing Webmaster Guidelines.

The following SEO tactics are considered black hat and should be avoided:

  • doorway pages
  • hidden text or links
  • keyword stuffing
  • sneaky redirects
  • link schemes
  • private blog networks
  • link manipulation 
  • article spinning
  • link farms, link wheels, or link networks
  • cloaking 
  • pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content
  • pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, and other types of malware
  • buying backlinks
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