Black Hat SEO is the practise of trying to trick the major search engines including Google into believing your site offers a more valuable service to users than it actually does.

  1. Duplicate Content – as Google defines it, duplicate content is having the exact same text on different web pages with in the same web site.
  2. Content Spamming – involves tricking a search engine into thinking a web site has relevant keyword-rich content when it really doesn’t. An example would be to have lots of content that is unreadable to a user.
  3. Image Keyword Stuffing – Google reads the alt attribute associated with all images to understand the purpose of the image. Image keyword stuffing is the practise of stuffing the alt attribute of an image with keywords unrelated to the actual image.
  4. Invisible Keyword Stuffing – including lists of keywords and key phrases that are invisible to a reader but visible to search engine bots.
  5. Doorway Pages – small web pages that contain no value content but link to a legitimate web page. Like many black hat seo techniques doorway pages used to be a valid SEO technique but is now blacklisted owing to exploitation.
  6. Scrapper Sites – sites that are made specifically for generating revenue through ads and are created from article generators. Article generators crawl the Internet taking content from different well ranked sources and merging it all into one source.
  7. Link Farming – link farms are sites that exist solely to link to other web sites. Link farms are a blatant attempt to inflate your link popularity, and search engines take a dim view of them. Do not include your website in a suspected link farm.
  8. Automated Submissions to Google – using software packages such as Web Position Gold to automatically submit your website Many website owners and SEO companies use software packages such as Web Position Gold to automatically submit their websites to multiple search engines. Again, this breaks Google’s terms of service and could led to you being removed.
  9. Violating AdSense – clicking on your own AdSense ads to generate revenue for your own AdSense Account. You will never receive the money and your website will be blacklisted.
  10. Email Spamming – spamming email accounts with regular junk emails.

I would strongly urge you to avoid the temptation to involve your website in any of the above practises. While you may get away with some techniques for period of time Google and all the major search engines will figure out what exactly you are doing and your website will be penalised accordingly.  If you are unsure as to what is allowed or what is not acceptable to Google check out

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