What is Black Hat SEO?

When working on any search engine optimization project the question always comes up wondering if what we are doing is “white hat”, “black hat”, or somewhere in between. To understand the question it’s important to know what is “black hat”…

  • Cloaking: Showing pages to Google that are different than the rest of the world.
  • Hacking accounts/sites: Breaking into high value accounts and web sites for .EDU and .GOV sites to add your links.
  • Link hijacking: Buying a domain similar to an existing domain and then contacting webmasters to redirect the links to the new domain.
  • Attacking competition: Build links from bad neighborhoods to your competition to lower their rankings.
  • Google Suggest spam: Trick the Google Suggest tool into adding all sorts of garbage suggestions like ‘[competitor] sucks’, ‘[competitior] scam’, etc.
  • Fake reviews: Add fake reviews on the assorted review sites that denigrate your competitior.
  • And the list goes on…
  • As you can see, there are many ways to be a black hat SEO and we don’t engage in any of these methods. These approaches can get you banned by Google and have you dancing on the possibility of being sued for illegal activities.

    We stick firmly to the ‘grey hat’ tactics that are legal and effective, but don’t put you or your company at risk. When talking with a SEO it’s important to make sure that they walk this line as well.