Black hat SEO is unfortunately too common and too easy to get sucked into if you aren’t a well-informed consumer. Today we’ll discuss what it is and how to stay away from it.

Black hat SEO is an unethical way of creating better search engine rankings through dirty methods that aren’t accepted by search engines. Oftentimes, these methods will help companies gain popularity within search engines very quickly, but it can also get you banned from search engines when you’re caught, which is not what you want for your company.

What is considered black hat in the SEO realm? Keyword stuffing is one of the big ones and there are a few different methods for this. Packing your site with keywords and nothing else, nothing really relevant to your visitors is one of these methods. People also try adding keywords to their content that are searched frequently so their rankings can rise, but these words don’t really go with the rest of the content on the page. Make sure your content is created for your users, above all else people need to get something from your site. Search engines will reward good content with better rankings but target your visitors before search engines.

Invisible text and links are also black hat and penalized by search engines. Some people think if they use white text on top of a white background, users won’t see it but search engines will. Well, this is true, but they will notice eventually and they won’t like it. People can also hide text through CSS, making the text truly only visible to search engines, which is another bad method.

Doorway pages are fake pages that contain nothing for real users, and are only for search engines to crawl. As mentioned above, your users are who your site is for, and should be targeted before search engines.

Link farms are a group of websites that all link to all the other pages in the group in order to increase rankings. This sounds great in theory because Google gives you points for every site that links to your site, and more popular sites are worth more value. Link farms are usually auto generated to create lots of links but search engines greatly penalize these sites so it’s not a good idea to get involved in it. Instead, conduct a link campaign by asking colleagues, professional partners, or businesses that you do business with to put your link on their site. This will help get you links from other sites, but in an ethical and search engine-friendly manner.

Be aware that this dirty methods do actually work, and some of them very quickly but these sites will get caught in the long wrong and the penalty isn’t worth the risk. Clean and ethical SEO does work too, but it takes time and patience. Gaining search engine rankings doesn’t happen overnight, but if you keep with it, the reward will be great in the end.