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