What is Black Hat? Discover this set of techniques!

What is a Black Hat? Discover the set of techniques that can harm your website’s positioning!

In an increasingly competitive and aggressive market, companies and brands on the rise that wish to increase visibility in search engines like Google tend to adopt equally aggressive techniques to ensure good organic positioning in the short term. However, care must be taken so that the “rebound effect” doesn’t occur and these search engines penalize your website, so my first tip is: avoid Black Hat!

But what is Black Hat, after all?

Do you remember the Bang Bang movies, with bad guys and good guys on top of their horses in the Wild West of the USA? Well, the villains were generally represented wearing black hats, while the good guys wore white hats, right?

Bringing this into the light of digital marketing and, above all, SEO, black hat SEO is read as the aggressive use of SEO techniques without proper contextualization, with the sole and exclusive intention of positioning the website well, without considering the user experience. User, whether in the visual or textual aspect, while white hats refer to good practices in SEO.

Practices such as excessive repetition of keywords, duplicate Content, spam in comments, purposeful creation of websites that link to yours to gain positioning and many others are harshly condemned by Google, which has been increasingly improving its algorithms to detect (and punish) companies that act this way.

Adoption of SEO techniques x user experience: how to please your persona while meeting Google’s parameters?

Robots have been increasingly used in companies and industries across all sectors. Imagine how useful they are in technology in companies like Google.

Every time you upload Content to your website, Google takes time to index it and uses robots that “scan” the texts, images, links and other resources used on the pages to check the Content. How relevant that Content is to the keyword in evidence.

As these robots are not human, some SEO techniques that Google establishes to define whether a website is relevant are more accurate than abstract. One is based on keywords: if you are talking about white blinds, this term must appear a few times in the text so the search engine understands that your text contains relevant Content about white blinds.

Based on this principle, people believe that repeating keywords excessively in texts can guarantee good positioning, but this is not the case: in addition to this excessive repetition leaving your reader with a heavy appearance and not favouring reading, Google also penalizes this practice, establishing a rate of, at most, 2% of keywords about the rest of the Content.

In reality, we can say that one thing is a consequence of the other: if your website does not provide a good user experience, Google will penalize it, so say no to Black Hat!

Find out the leading Black Hat practices and learn the respective white hats!

1. Too many keywordsAlready described previously, the first technique is keyword stuffing, which consists of excessive keyword repetition throughout the text to guarantee positioning. This practice is one of the oldest used since the relationship “relevance of the text — use of keywords” became known.
2. By providing a negative experience to the user who receives this Content, Google condemns the practice, and your text may even gain positioning for a while. Still, when search engine robots detect an excess of keywords, your website will be penalized and may even be banned from the biggest search engine in the world.
3. As an alternative to this, the ideal is to use keywords in a quantity that makes sense to your text, avoiding excessive repetition in the same paragraph. It is also worth using synonyms for the keywords, ensuring more fluid reading for the user and guaranteeing Google’s approval.
4. Copied Content is condemned in academia and even subject to penalties under the law; copying Content violates copyright principles, in addition to being a form of Black Hat that brings no relevance to your website, quite the opposite: it guarantees positioning to a site that published that Content first while penalizing the site that copied the information.
5. We often encounter exciting pages on the Internet, with content aggregating and bringing references, data, research and testimonials. However, you must get original information for your business, even to give greater authority to your persona.
6. Try to read about the same subject from different sources and extract information from reference sites for that topic, linked to national agencies, regional councils, national data and research institutes, among others. It is also important to always cite the sources from which that data came, giving greater credibility to the information and creating a good network of links that direct the user to reliable and relevant sites, which is also well-regarded in the eyes of Google.
7. Hidden Content or linksMany websites not only use Black Hat techniques but also try to hide this produced Content, camouflaging it with tiny fonts or leaving texts and links with the same background colour as the website’s layout.
8. Hidden texts or hidden links may even go unnoticed in the eyes of the user, who may only see an ample blank space. Still, there is no way to deceive Google: the search engine has enough mechanisms and robots to detect these practices, which will bring no good result for your business, penalizing it.
9. Insert reliable links on your website, and do not direct your user to malware (malicious Content with spam, Internet scams, adware and viruses that harm your user). This way, your website will gain relevance, and users will give credibility to your brand and business; after all, if even the German BMW was already penalized for the practice of Doorway Page in 2007, it’s better not to risk it, right?
10. Doorway Pages e Cloaked PagesStill in an attempt to manipulate search engines, Black Hat practices can go further, creating pages that are mere “gateways” with no value to the user that unduly direct them to another page that needs to gain visibility, which, in turn, it will be overly optimized without providing relevant Content to the user as well. This technique is known as the doorway page and is firmly rejected by Google.
11. In the same direction as the Doorway Page, there are cloaked pages, hidden pages that show one type of result to the search engine and another to the user to deceive search engines and gain good positioning. Cloaking and creating doorway pages are Black Hat SEO practices that should be avoided on your website.
12. Create pages that direct to correct links, and do not try to deceive or manipulate search engines. When this is detected, your site will significantly drop in positioning and may suffer punishment or even ban from the platform.
13. Paid or exchanged links between websites, paying for another website to publish your website’s link somewhere, or making exchanged disclosures (promoting site x on your website and site x promoting your website on theirs) are also Black Hat SEO practices that are not well regarded by the Google search engine, which penalizes such procedures and has tools to identify them.
14. As SEO work is based on organic results, there is nothing like creating an organic network of contacts and receiving publicity naturally due to the quality or relevance of your product or service.

Many people might tell you it’s easier to do it the “wrong” way, but those rules don’t apply to SEO. Before anything else, you need to know the