What is Black Hat SEO? Search Engine Optimization (Explained)
okay everybody so today I'm gonna talk
to you about blackhat SEO if you don't know what blackhat SEO is it's still a
thing it's still out there it's a way that people basically try to target your
website and take your website down that's negative SEO that's a type of
blackhat SEO and it's also this concept of getting ranked or doing things in
Google that are against their guidelines so blackhat SEO is anything that
violates search engines Terms of Service my name is John Lincoln I'm an SEO
expert I'm gonna tell you everything that you need to know a black about
blackhat SEO in this video so first SEO in blackhat SEO it's kind
of broken up into two different areas so there's link schemes and then kind of
the general blackhat SEO stuff right so let's start out with the link schemes so
what are the link schemes that are considered against Google's Terms of
Service first thing is buying links so if you're buying links from other
websites you are not allowed to do that just purchasing a link Google doesn't
want you to do that they want you to earn the links next link exchanges so if
I say excuse me sir if you link to me I'll link to you from this website that
is not allowed and if I say oh if you link to me from this website I'll link
to you from another website that's also not allowed they don't want you
exchanging links this used to be a huge thing that people would do years and
years ago and it really worked very well but today you cannot do that article
marketing guest posts anything that's low-quality so if I write a hundred
articles and I get them posted on a whole bunch of other websites around the
web Google is gonna pick up on that pattern and you're gonna get a manual
action penalty which will show up inside a Google search console or you might get
a penguin penalty which is what happens when you have too many links pointing
out your website with the same anchor text anchor text is just a term that
basically means the text that's inside of the lake so if this was linked to for
example it said link exchanges link exchanges would be the anchor text of
that link so you can do guest posts you can do article marketing but it can't be
massive it can't be low-quality articles it can only be if you write a really
great article and you link to something relevant within the article to something
that's relevant on another website or on your website
anything that's automated is bad so there's a lot of different programs out
there that do something called link indexing so basically if you get a link
on another website there's a chance that Google might not even see that link so
you can use these automation programs to build a whole bunch of
they're links to a whole bunch of other links that would then go to that final
link so if your link is here and you have all these other links that are on
these other sites and then all these other links on my on these other sites
that are built by an automation program these would link to these these would
link to these and so on and so forth and build more authority to this link that's
going to your site right so automation programs are against Google's guidelines
and there's quite a bit of them out there they're not quite as big as they
used to be though and then profile links so if you go out and you just build a
whole bunch of social media profiles or you build a whole bunch of profiles on
forum sites so on and so forth profiles anywhere around the web and then you put
links in those two pages that you're trying to get ranked higher you can get
a penalty for that as well that's blackhat SEO and then link networks so
any type of network where you go and you pay and they put you on a whole bunch of
different websites and link from those web sites to your website that's also
blackhat SEO and Google is taking those down all the time okay so we covered
most of the linking stuff let's get into some of the other type of blackhat SEO
things that are out there comment spam so if you are using a program to
automatically generate comments on other web sites or to automatically generate
comments on your own website any type of fake comment that's helping you rank
better in Google or hurting your competitors and making them work rank
worse than Google through negative SEO is not allowed and that is black hat SEO
sneaky redirects so if you have one page that's ranking and then you're
redirecting somebody else to another page that's an example of black hat SEO
as well trading products for links so that's another thing that you can't do
so you can't necessarily say here's a product link to my website here's some
money link to my website that's the same as buying things and link Bay in switch
so if you create a scholarship for example say you have a scholarship and
you're a whole bunch of links in through this
scholarship because educational institutions are seeing the scholarship
they want a link to it so that their students can confine the scholarship and
this is something you really can't do anyways but say you do that and then you
eventually 301 redirect that page to another page to get the links going to
another page that is also blackhat SEO in something you can't do keyword
stuffing putting too many keywords on a page is enough is something you can't do
cloaking showing Google one page but then serving another hidden content you
can't hide content on a page that's not allowed
articles spinning just creating articles and just creating pages so that they
rank in Google and they're very thin content a lot of people will do this
through some type of PHP script there's something called a Content matrix where
you can create five versions of a paragraph have dynamic field spin it
create doorway pages that rank in Google you're not allowed to do that either
scraped content stealing content from around the web serving that on your site
so that it gets ranked that's also not allowed funny thing about that Google
won't allow you to do that for their Terms of Service you can't scrape
content but yeah if you actually think about what Google does they scrape
content to serve it in their search results and they're doing that more and
more and more especially with the new knowledge panels Rich Snippets things
like that and then even meta titles and descriptions I mean that's just scraped
content of course we want to do all this for Google because we want to get that
traffic right and it's the biggest search engine in the world any Auto
generated content you're not allowed to do and then bait-and-switch stuff we
talked a little bit about social media spam if you're just getting thousands
and thousands of shares from other social sites that you're buying
that's blackhat SEO and something you're not allowed to do and then rich snippet
markup spam so putting Rich Snippets on pages so putting elements in the code
that are going to enhance your listing inside of Google that's not actually
relevant to that page that's considered spam as well so that's another thing you
can't do it's blackhat SEO any automated queries so if you're using
something to generate fake traffic that's searching for your company or
your keyword and then coming in and clicking on your website that's called
an automated query that's nothing that you're allowed to do within Google so no
automated queries and no negative SEO so if you really hate your competitor
you're like I don't like this guy or girl and I'm gonna build thousands of
low-quality links to his site to get him a penalty to make it look like he was
doing all this blackhat SEO stuff you cannot do that that's considered
blackhat SEO if you're doing blackhat SEO a negative SEO against your
competitor okay URL injection spam so sometimes what
you'll see happen is somebody will hack a site like WordPress and then they will
inject links into pages or they will hack pages or they will create thousands
and thousands of pages and this is just done through a script and then what
happens is they put links on those pages this happens a lot in spaces like viagra
cialis you know these these pills right and these are notoriously kind of spammy
areas for SEO so watching out for hack hack 2011 on and then domain squatting
so if somebody goes and buys coca-cola and they won't sell it to coca-cola and
they're just holding onto it even though that's their trademark you're not
allowed to do that as well blackhat SEO these are all the things
that you cannot do now what do you do if you are being targeted by negative SEO
or you're being targeted by blackhat SEO from a negative perspective or you've
done blackhat SEO and now you want to get your website back into a good place
well that's a good question so all the links scheming type of stuff that really
goes through disavow files that as far as going into Google search console you
want to disavow links you want to block those links you have to go in and remove
a lot of these links so you'll have to go back
can take them down there's actually a tool called a remover which is really
good for sending out masked messages and keeping track of how many links have
been taken down and how many haven't been you can send automated messages in
a sequence to take those things down you're gonna have to take down and and
cancel any type of automated programs any type of sponsors you have delete any
profile links and get get out of any link networks if you want to get out of
that whole blackhat side and have your website be looked as a clean quality
website inside of Google now these type of things also are gonna need to be
dealt with so if you have done keyword stuffing you're gonna have to reduce it
if you've traded products for links you're gonna have to go back and clean
that up maybe do a Rhian clusion request with Google if you've done cloaking or
hitting content or malicious content you're gonna have to clean all those
things up if you have doorway pages you're gonna have to take them down
you're gonna have to redirect them if you've done bait and switch you're gonna
have to push that old page live that was there we're you're gonna have to remove
the pages entirely in form of forum if you've got URL injection spam if your
domains been hacked you're gonna have to check out the hacked area within Google
to find out what's gone wrong and how you can fix it and there's so much more
to so much more to negative SEO and blackhat SEO that I didn't cover today
so that's it for blackhat SEO if you have a comment make sure to leave one
I'd love to answer any of your questions on the topic it's something that's out
there something that's still very real today if you liked this video make sure
to like comment and subscribe and I'll see you next time
