Some people think black hat SEO is dead, however I know for a fact that it’s not. This isn’t because I use black hat SEO techniques, no, it’s because my competitors use them to outrank some of my pages for very long periods of time, quite successfully I might add. After spending years studying the different black hat SEO techniques that they employ, I’ve put everything together (including descriptions of each trick) into what I’m calling “The Big List Of Over 100 Black Hat SEO Techniques” for you to read.
Just to clarify, I’m not advocating the use of any of these techniques, so if you decide to use any of them rather than just be aware of these black hat SEO tricks, it’s at your own risk.
The Big List Of Over 50 Black Hat SEO Techniques
There are currently 50 black hat SEO techniques in this list. Improvements and new additions are always being added to the list.
- PBNs: Private blog networks, also known as PBNs, are the latest craze in the black hat SEO community. They’re essentially a collection of websites used for the sole purpose of directing links to another website (usually a “money website”).
- Keyword Stuffing: This is simply when you use the same keyword too many times throughout your article to increase your keyword density.
- Cookie Stuffing: Cookie stuffing is when an affiliate site installs a fake cookie for another website into your browser.
- Tiny Text: This is an old trick of making text very small that was often used in conjunction with keyword stuffing.
- Scraped Text: This is when a webmaster uses a bot (or they do it manually) to find text on other sites that they can paste on their websites.
- Scraped Images: This is when a webmaster steals images from other websites (copyrighted, usually).
- Stolen Videos: Some webmasters have been known to rip entire videos and upload them to their own websites to increase user engagement.
- Referrer Spam: Read my article about referrer spam here.
- Link Farms: Any website that is used for the sole purpose of directing to other websites.
- Typosquatting: This is when you register a misspelt version of a domain name that’s similar to another one.
- Cybersquatting: This is when you outright steal a domain name from a business only to direct traffic to your own website or to sell back to the owner at a high price.
- Misleading Titles: Usually in the form of clickbait, misleading titles often have little to nothing to do with the body text.
- Gibberish Text: Some site owners actually have pages with nothing but gibberish text (e.g., Lorem Ipsum). I have no idea what they think they’re accomplishing with these pages.
- Link Exchanges: Anyone who exchanges links with another websmaster.
- Article Spinning: This is when someone changes the words or sentences in an article so that they can post it on their own website without receiving a duplicate content warning.
- Doorway Pages: These pages direct visitors to other pages without them knowing.
- Paid Links: Any links you pay for (such as SAPE). These are considered “unnatural links”.
- Parasite SEO: Read my article about it here. It’s considered manipulating the SERPs.
- Using GSA SER: This is a black hat SEO tool used to build spammy backlink.
- Poor Spelling & Grammar: Google likes to think that it cares about quality, so a page filled with poor spelling and grammar isn’t a good sign.
- Clickbait: Any misleading title or image used to make an article more interesting than it actually is.
- Pages That Automatically Download Files: I can’t stand this, but some sites try to download files the second you visit them.
- Linkbait: Content that is meant to entice users into linking back to the page.
- Malware Pages: Pages that contain malware aren’t allowed in Google.
- Hacking Websites: Hacking your competitors’ websites to destroy their website is both part of black hat SEO and illegal.
- Illegal Content: Child porn, illegal weapons, etcetera. I shouldn’t have to explain why this content isn’t allowed.
- Hidden Affiliate Links: Some users hide affiliate links in their articles to increase their revenue if you make a purchase.
- Intrusive Ads: If ads keep popping up every second, nobody will want to stay on your website.
- Brandjacking:
- Negative SEO: This usually involves pointing low quality links at your competitor’s website in order to lower their position in the SERPs. It is usually unsuccessful and sometimes negative SEO ends up helping your competitors rank.
- Comment Spam: Spamming the comments section of different websites with your link.
- Guest Blog Links: I’m not even kidding, Google thinks guest blogging, which is when you blog on another persons’ website, is spam.
- Malicious Duplicate Content: Any duplicate content that is meant to alter your rankings.
- Virus Pages: Any webpages that contain viruses.
- Writing For Search Engines: Any articles that are optimised for search engines to understand but not for humans to understand.
- Over-Optimisation: Yes, there is such a thing as too much SEO.
- Thin Affiliate Websites: Websites with automatically generated content that aims to have users click on affiliate links.
- Mirror Websites: A copy of a website hosted on a different location. Usually used by download websites.
- Unnatural Link Anchor Text: Some people spend so much time trying to diversify their link profile’s anchor text that it ends up looking unnatural anyway.
- Alt Tag Keyword Stuffing: This is when a site owner puts their keyword into the alt text of images a dozen times thinking nobody is going to notice.
- Rich Snippet Abuse: When you see stars under a site in the SERPs, there’s a chance that these ratings are fake. This is called rich snippet abuse.
- Low-Quality Content: Basically an umbrella term for almost anything I mentioned above and below.
- Blank Pages: Some people just have blank pages that they expect to rank for whatever keyword. These are usually under construction pages.
- Thin Content: Just another word for automatically generated pages, doorway pages, and other pages that add little to no value to the reader.
- Automatically Generated Pages: As mentioned above, these pages are created using bots.
- Excessive Outbound Links: Also known as a “high OBL”, which is when you link to a bunch of different sites on the same page, which Google may interpret as link spam.
- Sending False Google Reports: Some people try to falsely report their competitors thinking that Google will take them out of the SERPs.
- Link Scheming: Any backlinks that are used to manipulate your rankings.
- Link Wheels: A bunch of web 2.0 links pointing to your money website.
- Phishing Pages: Pages used to get sensitive information for its visitors. I don’t need to say anything more about this.
Conclusion
There you have it, The Big List Of Over 100 Black Hat SEO Techniques. If you have any techniques you would like to add to the list, then leave a comment below.