What is Black-hat SEO?

Black-hat SEO is negatively influencing the search engine indexing process. Google can punish you for this.

What is Black-hat SEO?

Black-hat SEO is negatively influencing the search engine indexing process. A webmaster tries to get pages on his or her website/webshop to rank high in the search results. He does this by manipulating the algorithm of the relevant search engine. This form of SEO refers to the outlaws who always wore black hats in old Westerns. Search engines like Google are doing everything they can to combat this. Therefore, Google regularly makes updates that cause web pages with such activities to drop dramatically in search results. The opposite of a black hat is white-hat SEO.

How do you recognize it?

There are several techniques by which you can recognize black-hat SEO. Below we list the most common.

• Keyword stuffing: Here the keyword is written in the text as often as possible in order to appear at the top of the results, but this makes the text difficult to read;
• Duplicate content: This is the case when there are text blocks that are too similar in content, for example when a piece of text has been copied from another site;
• Spam comments: This can be recognized by comments that are not natural and sincere;
• Doorway pages: Here you are redirected as a visitor to a page that is not relevant to the search. This is only done to rank for certain keywords;
• Link exchange: This is the case when a link profile is created that consists of links that are not naturally obtained.