Black hat SEO

- Seeking links from popular directories and other websites

- Ensuring pages are properly optimized for social media in order to pull in more social links

- Exchanging links with other relevant website

Black hat SEO

Now that you know what white hat SEO is, you can probably guess what black hat is. This is the use of SEO methodologies that are meant to manipulate search engines into ranking websites higher than they ought to be. The goal here is simple; get to the top of the rankings whichever way possible.

Of course there’s always the risk of the search engine picking up on your tricks and penalizing you, but many people still use this tricks to get ahead. Black hat tricks are used for these reasons:

- They actually work- for a while until the search engine catches up with you and tosses you to the back of the line

- A large number of people haven’t yet identified which tricks are black hat so they end up outsourcing SEO to firms that utilize such methods, and the site gets penalized for it.

Keep in mind that even if the search engine doesn’t immediately pick up on your tricks, your competitors will and they will not hesitate to report you. Here are some examples of black hat SEO:

Content

- Keyword stuffing: lots of websites overuse their keywords, meta tags and alt tags

- Using keywords in hidden text- usually done by manipulating colors, where the font color is made the same as the background color

- Using too many keywords in visible text, which makes it overly repetitive to the average reader

Deceptive content

- Good examples include doorways or gateways which get stuffed with keywords visible only to search engines but which redirect people to the page with actual content

- Cloaking or display of varying content to search engines while displaying different content to people

Linking