What Is Black Hat SEO?
I have been reading a lot online about Black Hat SEO working to get good rankings. Should our company be using black hat for our SEO? We need traffic for our website and need to know if black hat SEO works?
Deeho Replied:
Black hat optimization is against Google webmaster guidelines. There are many different black hat strategies that you can employ to dupe Google into ranking your site higher than it should rank naturally.
In recent years, Google has become very efficient at finding and removing sites that employ black hat techniques such as ‘cloaking’, ‘invisible text’, etc.
Cloaking is where you present search engines with a different page of content to the page that you show your visitors. Google dislikes this and penalises sites using the practice on a very regular basis. Unless you have a lot of experience cloaking sites, it isn’t a strategy that you should use or get involved with, as remaining undetected in the long term is very difficult.
We don’t recommend any one to use any black hat SEO techniques because it isn’t in the long term interests of your site and business to only ever be one click from exclusion.
Hidden text used to be used a lot by web masters to add content to a page without having to show a lot of ugly text on a simple beautifully designed page. Google can easily spot hidden text and if you give them any reason to doubt your intentions, they will penalise your site.
Your first job as a web master is to avoid anything that could see your site demoted in SERP’s. While I have no doubt that there are probably a few black hat strategies that are still working to manipulate search today, they are not guaranteed to continue working today, tomorrow or at any point in the future.
Our advice to all website owners is to avoid black hat as a promotion strategy. You can get the results that you need using Google friendly white hat SEO combined with a few grey hat strategies to speed the process up.