Black hat SEO tactics are search engine optimization tactics that go against search engine guidelines. These practices can get you penalized or even blocked from certain search engines without warning. If you are going to be using SEO strategies, it is extremely important that you know and can recognize these tactics so that you can avoid them. This blog will outline that major black hat SEO tactics.

Mirror Sites

Creating multiple sites that have the exact same content. If you create multiple websites with different domains that each have the exact same content, this is classified as a mirror site. Google considers this type of duplicate content against policy and will penalize both sites.

Cloaking

Cloaking is when your site shows different content to search engines than it does to visitors. This kind of dishonest content is heavily disliked by search engines and is likely to get your site blocked.

Keyword stuffing

This is a tactic wherein you ‘stuff’ you site full of certain keywords in order to boost your ranking. While using keywords in your SEO tactics is important, overusing them can be severely counterproductive.

Unnatural Anchor Text

Using the same keyword in all of your link anchors in order to get a higher ranking in a certain keyword is another common black hat tactic. This can be easily recognized by search engines and is heavily penalized.

Keeping broken links as a part of your site

If your website incorporates or includes broken links, it can cause a big problem with search engines. Websites will sometimes do this in order to include more website links, which might normally help your search ranking. Hoverer when a practice like this is used with broken links, it can result in severe penalties.

Content Scraping

Using a ton of content from other websites in order to increase your sites content is known as content scraping. This tactic can be a big problem not just because search engines discourage it, but also because it can violate copyright laws.

Title stacking

Title stacking is adding more than one HTML title tag per page. Adding extra HTML title tags or < title > tags is an old trick used to boost your websites publicity. However, this trick is well known by search engines, and is easy for sites to prevent.

Buying links

Buying links from other websites in order to increase your sites number of links is a big problem for search engines. Most platforms consider this practice as spam and will not tolerate it.

Building fake links

Similar to buying links, creating random links that have no connection to your website is another bad practice. This tactic is also considered spam, and if search engines see you doing it, you will be penalized.

Article spinning

Article spinning is when a website creates multiple articles by making only small changes to a single article. This is another tactic that search engines consider close to spam, and if a search engine thinks your content is spam it can be a big problem for your website.

While using SEO strategy to improve your websites visibility is great, it is also incredibly important to avoid bad practices that can hurt you in the long run.