BLACK HAT SEO: HOW RISKY IS IT REALLY?
Black hat SEO involves unethical tactics to manipulate search engine rankings. While potentially risky, it can lead to severe penalties like ranking demotion or complete de-indexing. So, just how risky is black hat SEO, really?
Risky Black Hat SEO Tactics
Before we discuss the risks of black hat SEO tactics, let’s discuss what classifies as black hat SEO to begin with. One prime example of black hat SEO is keyword stuffing and tag manipulation. This involves excessively repeating keywords throughout a website's content, including title tags, meta descriptions and body text. The goal is to trick search engines into thinking a page is more relevant to a specific search query than it actually is.
Another common black hat practice is tag manipulation. This involves manipulating HTML tags, such as header tags (H1, H2, etc.) and meta tags, to mislead search engines. For instance, stuffing keywords into these tags or using irrelevant keywords can artificially inflate a page's ranking.
To illustrate, consider the following example:
A website selling shoes might stuff keywords like "cheap shoes," "discount shoes," and "best shoes" into every possible corner of the page, including the title tag, meta description, and body text. Additionally, they might use irrelevant keywords like "car insurance" or "dog food" in an attempt to game the search engine algorithm.
Such tactics were more prevalent in the early days of SEO. However, search engines have become increasingly sophisticated in detecting and penalizing black hat techniques. Engaging in these practices can lead to severe consequences, including a significant drop in search engine rankings, or even complete removal from search results.
Why People Use Black Hat Tactics
People use these tactics because they work to some degree at first. Implemented right, you can hit the top of the search results for key search terms – especially long tail search phrases – until search engines catch up. For scammers selling barely legal or questionable products, they use the tactics because they don’t care if one landing page is shut down. This is why websites that don’t care if they’ll be taken down in six months can and do use black hat SEO tactics. But for most website owners, the effects of black hat SEO can be disastrous and un-reversible.
The Penalties for Black Hat SEO Strategies
If the issue is egregious enough, your site will be blacklisted by Google and impossible to find unless you have an incredibly good social media outreach strategy. Google sometimes penalises businesses to the point they cannot be found in commerce related searches. JC Penny’s was punished in this way when they were found guilty of massive black hat SEO campaigns for “JC Penny’s dresses” and “women’s dresses”. You couldn’t find JC Penny’s as a search result when searching for women’s wear, but searches for the company’s stock prices and about the company itself still came back.
If your site is flagged for link spam, Google will decide to disregard all of your links. Now the only way you can be found is by cultivating a network of websites that take people to your website, but not via a doorway page or else you’ll be shut out entirely. Once blacklisted, getting your rankings back up is almost impossible.
Conclusion
Black hat SEO is no small affair and Google and other search engines are doing everything in their power to catch people who use shoddy SEO practices. So, if you were tempted by using black hat SEO techniques in the future, we hope this piece was enough to discourage you.
