Black hat SEO techniques: are they worth it?

What is black hat SEO?

Any practice that intends to increase a website’s rank in search engines, through the violation of search tools’ terms of use, is considered “black hat SEO”. These unethical approaches can result in a website being banned from Google or Firefox, for example, which makes them very risky to use. A list of strategies was reported on Google’s and Bing’s “Webmaster Guidelines” to prevent users from penalty measures.

Why are these actions prohibited?

These practices all have one thing in common they are not adding any value to the user whatsoever, but their only purpose is to be visible by search engines. Any practice that falls into this is very likely to be black hat, even if it is not listed on a webmaster guideline. And this is applicable to any internet practice, not only search engine optimization practices.
Examples of black hat SEO techniques:

1. Link exchange

It’s basically exchanging links with other websites, in order to have as much links as possible to improve your rank on search engines. Link exchange is disapproved because sites should have links naturally, instead of exchanging them irrelevantly or even get paid for them. The thing is, it will not necessarily improve your rank, and it might be a waste of time and money, if you get caught.

2. Hidden links and texts

Here are the main characteristics of hidden content:
– The text is usually illegible
– It is often located at the very bottom of the web page
– The text is the same color as the background
The purpose of hidden content is to manipulate search engines with irrelevant keywords, without getting noticed by the reader.

3. Doorway/gateway pages

A web page is considered gateway when it is filled with high value keywords but also with incoherent content, as its primary goal is to achieve in search engines. A sa consequence, visitors are redirected to a different page that is often completely unrelated to the keywords.

4. UGC spam

User Generated Content spam is one of the most popular black hat SEO techniques because is one of the simplest. Spammers would just flood your comment sections with links that have nothing to do with your web page, just to multiply links and achieve high ranking.

Other than just risking a Google penalty or ban, the use of black hat SEO techniques is also the sign of a very poor on-page content, and this will definitely not be beneficial to your site, in the long run.
Still not convinced about not using black hat SEO techniques?
Check out this list of big companies who got sanctioned with Google penalties, for using black hat SEO techniques:

Black hat SEO techniques: are they worth it?