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What Is Black Hat SEO?
What Is Black Hat SEO? A Definition
Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices that are used to increases a site or page's rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines' terms of service. The term "black hat" originated in Western movies to distinguish the "bad guys" from the "good guys," who wore white hats (see white hat SEO). Recently, it's used more commonly to describe computer hackers, virus creators, and those who perform unethical actions with computers.
The following SEO tactics are considered black hat and should not be exercised at all if you want to stay above board with Google and other search engines:
Content Automation
Doorway Pages
Hidden Text or Links
Keyword Stuffing
Reporting a Competitor (or Negative SEO)
Sneaky Redirects
Cloaking
Link Schemes
Guest Posting Networks
Link Manipulation (including buying links)
Article Spinning
Link Farms, Link Wheels or Link Networks
Rich Snippet Markup Spam
Automated Queries to Google
Creating pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content
Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, trojans, and other malware
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