What Is Black Hat SEO ?
Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2025 6:04 am
Black Hat SEO is an unethical search engine positioning strategy that ignores the guidelines of search engines such as Google or Bing. The name comes from cowboy movies in which the bad guy is depicted wearing a black hat and the good guy wearing a white hat (cf. White Hat SEO). Spamming practices are used when creating links , for example, with external links that redirect from foreign pages to Spanish home pages. If these methods come to light, search engines exclude the websites from their indexation.
Cloaking
The term SEO cloaking refers to an unpopular search engine optimization method pharmaceuticals email database that tricks the crawler by showing it different versions of a web page. While the crawler “sees” version A of a web page, visitors are shown a completely different version B. Cloaking is a form of Black Hat SEO and is penalized by search engines.
In the Digital Guide you can find more information about cloaking , how it works and the different techniques that exist.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content refers to content that is very similar or identical to other websites. It negatively affects search engine rankings, so it is advisable not to use it. Google gives preference to “unique” content, i.e. genuine and high-quality content. Therefore, if the crawler finds identical content on different pages, it will lower the ranking of the last page that uploaded this content to the Internet. In addition, in the context of SEO, this content will be located and replaced.
Crawler
A crawler (also known as a web spider or bot) automatically searches the World Wide Web (WWW) for pages to analyze using specific criteria. The crawler operates independently and automatically repeats the tasks assigned to it. Search engines such as Google use crawlers to index content. This way, new web pages are included, those that no longer exist are removed, and existing ones are updated.
Deeplink
Deeplinks are a special form of backlinks that point to a subpage of a website. They direct visitors to a website directly to a specific topic. Deeplinks belong to Offpage SEO and are an integral part of a complete link profile.
Internal link
Internal links refer to a subpage within a website and are one of the most important tools for SEO. Firstly, meaningful internal links have added value for readers, as they allow quick access to further information. In addition, these links serve to optimise the structure of websites and are a relevant quality criterion for Google when evaluating pages. The Google crawler reads the internal link structure of websites and takes this into account when ranking. Link power , which is also transmitted via internal links, serves to improve the ranking of subpages and category pages.
Title tag
The “title” element specifies the title of a web page and is displayed both in the browser and in the Google search results list. It is used to directly access the web page. To achieve a good click-through rate, it is important that the click-through rate is simple, precise and expressive . The “title” tag is one of the ranking factors in Google and will also be taken into account in OnPage search engine positioning. Each URL will have a unique “title” and ideally the keyword should appear at the beginning of the “title”.
Keyword
A keyword is a key word or a combination of keywords. In the context of SEO, they are typically used to refer to the terms that users type into search engines to find information on specific topics. That is why websites must be optimized with certain keywords so that when the search engine performs the relevant searches, they are classified as relevant and, as a result, appear as high as possible in the list of results.
Landing page
A landing page is a web page designed exclusively for advertising and marketing purposes. Search engine optimization is used to make changes to the landing page so that it appears in search results for relevant keywords. This type of page allows you to sell specific products or services. It is recommended that essential content, information and a direct call to action are presented clearly and precisely.
Link building
Link building is a technique that consists of the deliberate construction of a backlink profile . The optimization is not done through the website itself, but through contact with third-party websites. Grouping these references is one of the most important tasks of off-page optimization. Since both Google and other search engines classify external links as references, they create a very important ranking factor .
Link Juice
Link power , also known as link juice, is determined by the distribution of external links on a website. In this respect, both quantity and quality (strength, reputation) play an important role. Link juice can be managed by linking from one page to another, and the better Google rates the source of an external link, the higher the authority of the link juice produced by that external link to the page.
Meta description
A meta description is a short text of approximately 156 characters that describes the content of an HTML document. It is intended to give the user an orientation of the content in one or two sentences. This meta description appears in the results list (SERP) as a component of a snippet under the title. If the webmaster does not include a description, Google independently generates a text from the first lines of the web page or from sentence fragments containing keywords. For the purpose of web positioning, meta tags (consisting of meta description, title tag and meta keywords) that are easy to use and contain keywords that generate many searches are placed in the header of an HTML document.
Cloaking
The term SEO cloaking refers to an unpopular search engine optimization method pharmaceuticals email database that tricks the crawler by showing it different versions of a web page. While the crawler “sees” version A of a web page, visitors are shown a completely different version B. Cloaking is a form of Black Hat SEO and is penalized by search engines.
In the Digital Guide you can find more information about cloaking , how it works and the different techniques that exist.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content refers to content that is very similar or identical to other websites. It negatively affects search engine rankings, so it is advisable not to use it. Google gives preference to “unique” content, i.e. genuine and high-quality content. Therefore, if the crawler finds identical content on different pages, it will lower the ranking of the last page that uploaded this content to the Internet. In addition, in the context of SEO, this content will be located and replaced.
Crawler
A crawler (also known as a web spider or bot) automatically searches the World Wide Web (WWW) for pages to analyze using specific criteria. The crawler operates independently and automatically repeats the tasks assigned to it. Search engines such as Google use crawlers to index content. This way, new web pages are included, those that no longer exist are removed, and existing ones are updated.
Deeplink
Deeplinks are a special form of backlinks that point to a subpage of a website. They direct visitors to a website directly to a specific topic. Deeplinks belong to Offpage SEO and are an integral part of a complete link profile.
Internal link
Internal links refer to a subpage within a website and are one of the most important tools for SEO. Firstly, meaningful internal links have added value for readers, as they allow quick access to further information. In addition, these links serve to optimise the structure of websites and are a relevant quality criterion for Google when evaluating pages. The Google crawler reads the internal link structure of websites and takes this into account when ranking. Link power , which is also transmitted via internal links, serves to improve the ranking of subpages and category pages.
Title tag
The “title” element specifies the title of a web page and is displayed both in the browser and in the Google search results list. It is used to directly access the web page. To achieve a good click-through rate, it is important that the click-through rate is simple, precise and expressive . The “title” tag is one of the ranking factors in Google and will also be taken into account in OnPage search engine positioning. Each URL will have a unique “title” and ideally the keyword should appear at the beginning of the “title”.
Keyword
A keyword is a key word or a combination of keywords. In the context of SEO, they are typically used to refer to the terms that users type into search engines to find information on specific topics. That is why websites must be optimized with certain keywords so that when the search engine performs the relevant searches, they are classified as relevant and, as a result, appear as high as possible in the list of results.
Landing page
A landing page is a web page designed exclusively for advertising and marketing purposes. Search engine optimization is used to make changes to the landing page so that it appears in search results for relevant keywords. This type of page allows you to sell specific products or services. It is recommended that essential content, information and a direct call to action are presented clearly and precisely.
Link building
Link building is a technique that consists of the deliberate construction of a backlink profile . The optimization is not done through the website itself, but through contact with third-party websites. Grouping these references is one of the most important tasks of off-page optimization. Since both Google and other search engines classify external links as references, they create a very important ranking factor .
Link Juice
Link power , also known as link juice, is determined by the distribution of external links on a website. In this respect, both quantity and quality (strength, reputation) play an important role. Link juice can be managed by linking from one page to another, and the better Google rates the source of an external link, the higher the authority of the link juice produced by that external link to the page.
Meta description
A meta description is a short text of approximately 156 characters that describes the content of an HTML document. It is intended to give the user an orientation of the content in one or two sentences. This meta description appears in the results list (SERP) as a component of a snippet under the title. If the webmaster does not include a description, Google independently generates a text from the first lines of the web page or from sentence fragments containing keywords. For the purpose of web positioning, meta tags (consisting of meta description, title tag and meta keywords) that are easy to use and contain keywords that generate many searches are placed in the header of an HTML document.