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The rumors are true: black hat SEO is alive. And if you do SEO for your own site, and invest in an SEO agency, you should beware that you or they could be doing bad practice tactics that could hinder your website in the future.

What Is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO, the opposite of white hat SEO, is a set of search engine optimization tactics deemed bad practice within the industry as they are easy but sneaky ways to improve your SEO quickly. While these strategies may briefly help you to increase your rankings, they go against Google’s guidelines, and if they catch on to you practicing such tactics, your site will likely be penalized.

10+ Black Hat Tactics to Avoid for Your SEO Strategy

Cloaking

In the video below, Matt Cutts from Google explains what cloaking is and how it goes against their quality guidelines. Their two examples of cloaking include:

  • Showing a page of images or flash to users, but displaying HTML to search engines
  • Hiding text and keywords to users, but having them show only to search engines

Having “Junk Food” Content

Have you ever searched for something and clicked on a website with under-researched or valueless content, a horrible user experience, bad graphics, and loads of random buttons? These junk food websites capitalize on mediocre content in mostly garbage articles, and they act as doorways to spammy links. You certainly don’t want your site to mimic their tactics.

Duplicate Content

Something we see a lot when we take on new clients, especially ones with a larger, product-based website, is that they are using the same copy across numerous pages.

While a lot of your products may be very similar, and having some sense of consistency in copywriting for your brand is good, Google and other search engines can read your website and see that you are duplicating your content. Note, this also applies to metadata and descriptions! You want very different copy on all of your pages, or at least as different as possible.

Beware that some forms of content syndication are seen as duplicate content, as this content is not only being published on your website, but on hundreds of others across the web!

Invisible Text and Links

While cloaking mentioned above is a little bit more advanced, another similar black hat method that some still partake in is changing the color of text and links on a page to have them blend into the background. This hides them from users, but still allows the page to get the value of the keywords and links from search engines.

While this might sound alluring, Google sees it as spam and will penalize you accordingly. In the older days of SEO, many disreputable sites were hiding irrelevant terms in their pages just so they could show up more often.

Blog Comments

Back in the day, commenting on community blogs was an easy, surefire way to get a link back to your website. However, this friendly way to interact with others in your industry has turned into a link spammer’s paradise, so it’s now officially a black hat tactic.

Keyword Stuffing

Not only does overusing keywords on a page make your content seem downright unreadable, but search engines are smart enough to catch onto your sneaky ways. And with local SEO growing over the past couple of years, keyword stuffing has gained a new life in Google Business Profiles – but it’s still a barred practice that can get your profile removed.

An exaggerated example of overusing keywords on a page would be:

“Looking for the perfect pair of blue shoes? Our blue shoes are unlike any other blue shoes on the market. These blue shoes are waterproof, slip-resistant, and highly durable. Buy our blue shoes today!”

Keyword Spamming in Business Name

As we briefly touched on above, businesses may try to unfairly manipulate local search rankings by adding keywords to their GBP name, since this can impact rankings. These keywords may include the type of business or the name of the city they operate. The practice of keyword stuffing is against Google’s guidelines, so it is perfectly acceptable to report any competitors who are seen doing this. However, be sure to do your due diligence before submitting them as spam, as it is now common to purchase a DBA (doing business as) license that would allow them to legally use this name. Typically, you can check this by looking up business registration in your state and checking the branding on their website.

Links Schemes

Having more backlinks to your website is a great way to gain a better presence in search engines. However, disreputable websites and link builders have created sneaky ways to help users get more links quickly: link schemes.

In fact, Google has an entire policy against various types of link schemes and the variety of tactics that violate their guidelines. So don’t do it!

Fake Reviews

Many might know that business owners will buy fake positive reviews that enhance their Google Business Profile reputation and ranking. Some people go even further by buying fake negative reviews for their competitor profiles, which can negatively impact their competitors’ ratings and SEO! Google tries to combat this practice by having a process in place for removing fake reviews. This hasn’t completely taken care of the problem, but it has helped. The first line of defense is the business itself, so it is extra important to monitor feedback on your GBP listing and watch out for suspicious reviews.

You can even take it a step further by looking at the reviews of your competitors, specifically looking out for generic feedback that doesn’t contain any information about the business, multiple reviews that share very similar language or phrasing, and errors in review content, such as mention of the wrong business or business type. Should you see these suspicious reviews, it is important to report them to Google by clicking the “Flag as inappropriate” button that appears next to the review.

Moving Google Maps Pins

Since early 2024, there have been reports by local businesses saying that their Maps pin has been moved without them moving it. People use the “Suggest an Edit” feature to edit the business’s location without their knowledge or consent by dragging the pin to a new location. This gives Google and other customers a false idea of where the business actually is.

This is problematic for customers and businesses alike. If you are a consumer in a car pinch and need to see a mechanic, you might drive to a location and discover that the mechanic does not exist there. On the other hand, you might have a car full of hungry people waiting for the restaurant reservation, just to find out that you drove 30 minutes in the wrong direction. You might think this is an error by the restaurant, but it is usually a black hat SEO causing this drama behind the scenes.

It also causes issues for businesses because once the pin moves, the location moves with it. Afterward, users in the area can no longer see the business on the map. This can result in a drop in local rankings, a decrease in foot traffic into a location, and even negative reviews for the lack of credibility.

Malicious Google Business Profile Edits

We have talked about moving location and fake reviews, but this does not conclude the list of Google Business Profile edits that black hat SEOs will try. Another unethical GBP edit is the use of the “Suggest an edit” button to change the information on their profile. This could include changing the address, website URL, business hours, or something else.

All of these fields can negatively impact rankings, so it is important to monitor these fields to ensure that they are consistent with your company’s information. Google does notify the business of any suggested edits and gives them the chance to approve, reject, or modify them. However, these notifications can go unnoticed, and if you don’t respond in time, Google can push these edits live (even if they are incorrect).

Additional Black Hat SEO Tactics to Look Out For

  • Content spinning – Generating or manipulating content to create multiple versions of the same article.
  • Buying links – Artificially increasing your site’s DR by purchasing links for spammy directories or other sites. Hint: Google typically catches on and will not sustain any reward you get from this.
  • Overoptimized anchors – Using a lot of exact-match anchor text in backlinks can benefit SEOs for the short term, but will not sustain for the long run.
  • Negative SEO – Harming competitor sites by building spammy backlinks, making it look like they were engaging in black hat tactics.

Stop Black Hat SEO Practices in Their Tracks

Most businesses are not employing black hat SEO tactics to improve their rankings. However, some do, and it is important to recognize the signs so that you can counteract these practices.

If you suspect a competitor is practicing black hat SEO or want to learn more about how you can combat it, be sure to contact our team.

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This blog post was originally published in July 2020 and has been updated to reflect industry shifts.

About the Author

Sarah Blocksidge

Sarah is our internal Marketing Director and crafts all of our agency's SEO strategies and helps manage our pay-per-click efforts to help us get more clients. She joined the company in 2016 after completing her degree in Strategic Communication at Miami University. Over the years her marketing advice has been featured in Fox Business, Search Engine Land, Content Marketing Institute, HubSpot, Fortune, and more. Follow Sarah on LinkedIn.