30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically
Wicked by xlorddashx.
Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practicioners. While I abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEOptimise is a clean white hat SEO company company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.
The sheer existence of black hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged for several reasons.
As Rishi Lakhani noted on his new SEO blog: You need it at least to know what to avoid or to know how competitors who perform worse than you still manage to outrank your site.
The good news is: Most black hat SEO techniques can be used in a clean, ethical white hat way as well.
They are like knives: You can slice bread with a knife but you can kill with it as well. It’s your decision how you use the knife. Also consider the problem with overall perception of the SEO industry. Your hat can be whiter than snow and still people will treat you as the guy with the virtual knife.
Personally I think black hat SEO is for the weak.
The black hat logic goes: When you can’t win the game you have to cheat. It’s the same dilemma as in sports though: When everybody cheats how are you going to win? That’s why reputable and successful SEO experts don’t have to use it.
OK, long story short, here are the 30 black hat techniques you can use ethically as well. Take note how I am explaining only the positive way of using each technique. I do not advocate the use of it in it’s original black hat context. Use these knives as kitchen knives:
black hat by googlisti
- Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.
- IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.
- 301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.
- Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com
- Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.
- Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.
- Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.
- Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.
- Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.
- Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.
- Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do.
- Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.
- Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.
- Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.
- Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.
- Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.
- New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.
- Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.
- Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.
- Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.
- Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.
- Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.
- Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.
- Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.
- Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.
- Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.
- Different content for search engines than users – Do you use WordPress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.
- Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.
- Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullshit” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.
- Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.
booze by tz1_1zt
Thanks to my Twitter followers @DerekEdmond, @seowolf and @DonnaFontenot for brain storming support on this list. The question I asked was:
What was the most evil black hat SEO technique your dirty, stinking competitors have worked with?
Why don’t you, the SEOptimise readers, answer this question as well? Otherwise just use these 30 black hat techniques ethically or try the many more white hat tactics first.
January 22nd, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Great Black Hat List, that’s Legal!
Here’s a complimentary in-depth discussion of Re-directs I found.
http://seosport.com/seo-domains/domain-keyword-recognition-in-301-redirects/
“1) Add your redirects to social bookmarks, website directories and blog comments so that they can crawl and index your redirected domains.
2) Get a premium dns service provider that can host all of your domains in one account that offers you the ability to fill in title, description and key words under each redirect record(I personally use dnsmadeeasy.com and it costs about $150 per year for all of my 200+ domains)”
January 22nd, 2010 at 5:05 pm
Great list, I think the term Black Hat was just coined together because it was portrayed as something that shouldn’t be done, I don’t see why, I still see high performing websites in Google’s index that have blackhat written all over them, and they seem to stay where they are! What are the whitehat options.
January 22nd, 2010 at 5:05 pm
I guess keyword-stuffing, hidden links and invisible text were my major sins of the past. Now, inadvertently, hidden text with CSS tricks!
January 22nd, 2010 at 5:29 pm
or write about someone and not link to them :)
# New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.
January 22nd, 2010 at 6:02 pm
Hmmm, Some of those techniques ARE black-hat but some of the ones you mentioned are gray-hat. A hybrid of ethical and non-ethical techniques.
In the end: Why do something deceptively when it can be done just as easily using 100% ethical techniques.
January 22nd, 2010 at 6:46 pm
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January 22nd, 2010 at 7:02 pm
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January 22nd, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Thanks for these list. Great list. Honestly, I am against using Black Hat SEO techniques, but this post made me give it the benefit of the doubt. Thanks for bringing this up, I will definitely talk about this on my blog(http://www.decentreview.com/blog)
January 23rd, 2010 at 12:16 am
Good article, these may once have been exclusively Black hat but are mostly mainstream now and accepted. “All things in moderation”. If you’re unsure about online promoting, hire a pro.
January 23rd, 2010 at 5:41 am
Thanks Tad Chef its really use full stuff for me and i must make bookmark your stuff coz its really useful. Sometime black hat technique is useful if you are not caught thank again dear
January 23rd, 2010 at 6:36 pm
I can attest for the subdomains, although not black hat in my case. We use them for areas on our used car websites. We break each city into a subdomain, and we often come up 3 different times on page one of searches from Google, Bing and Yahoo.
January 23rd, 2010 at 7:10 pm
Ethical Black Hat? ha. you really can rationalize anything.
How about just build good sites with good content? If your content is worth a damn you wont need to trick readers/bots with fake substance.
I invested time into the content and usability of my site and its returned a 350% jump in my traffic last year. I’m getting links you can’t begin to fake or even buy.
Make sites for people, not search engines.
January 24th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
Thanks for the advice. I have always tried to stay as ‘white hat’ as possible with our SEO techniques, but it is very useful to know what other people are doing and how they are doing it!
January 24th, 2010 at 4:06 pm
Buying links is black hat….
Kev, you buy links.
OR are you sayng you dont?
Nah, you wont reply….
January 25th, 2010 at 6:39 am
If you want to run a legit site, like SEOBlackhat.com, you can’t use blatant black hat tactics without getting banned.
January 25th, 2010 at 7:10 am
so complete the list is! Frankly I never use these black hat SEO techniques. I want to know are these SEO techniques legal? Many persons suggest that we should not use black hat SEO techniques.
January 25th, 2010 at 9:13 am
Great list and some really good examples how techniques can be used for good or evil. You mention a knife, I prefer “the force” ;)
Either way, it’s not what you do but how you do it. If memory serves me correctly, even Matt Cutts of Google has stated that IP delivery isn’t bad, if done for the right reasons. Generally I’d agree with the idea behind the adaptation of the other techniques for more ethical reasons.
January 25th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Powerful list!
January 25th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
DaveN: Shame on me lazy ass! Corrected.
Kyle Kazak: Indeed I haven’t focused on the shades of gray here. Paid links for example are considered gray hat by some and black hat by others (Google).
Jamie Ludlow: Thanks for the appreciation. Make sure to link your post in the comments when it’s done.
JoeShmoe: I couldn’t agree more. Sadly not all people are as righteous. You often have to deal with murky competition.
steve marken: Thanks for your comment. Take note that this post has been written by me, Tad Chef.
Robert: Exactly, that’s why we still have kitchen knives without the police arresting you!
January 25th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
I’ve been saying for some time that the BH techniques of today are the grey- and white-hat techniques of tomorrow. It’s held true for some time; innovations often occur within the BH community of SEOs, and later the methods are studied, adapted, and finally adopted by the mainstream.
January 26th, 2010 at 9:01 am
If you’re going to go buy links to your site, the important thing is to make it look as natural as possible, otherwise Google may penalize you.
January 26th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
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January 29th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
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February 6th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
Is it worth using black hat teqniques and risking penalisation from Google?
Such as hidden links and using different content for search engines than users.At the end of the day we can not be smarter than they are. The people at google have the resources to be the best.
February 8th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
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February 9th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
Great Article. Love some of the technique described here. IT is true that black hat is more defined by “technique + intention”. Thanks a lot for the info!
March 5th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
[...] 30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically | SEOptimise [...]
April 20th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
There is obviously no dividing line. Its grey scale, and its very hard to win when someone else is cheating.
April 21st, 2010 at 6:10 am
Oh guys, stop interpreting good advice wrongly, stop doing all that shit. Just do something simple. There’s even a peeplo.com case study floating around somewhere. But I made My first thousand online in 3 months, invested around 319.20USD (The twenty cent was from the hosting company -_-) We shouldn’t just implement these techniques blindly, its like swallowing a bottle of viagra just because other people say doing it works. And then walking around with a raging hard-on? (Swallowing a bottle of viagra does more than that, Trust me.) Now, Companies don’t hire hired hands to “optimize for search engines”. Corporations hire professional advisiors. Yeah, don’t listen to me if you’re (one out of 10 chance, of that being true) already making thousands/millions/billions or trillians ;)
Jokes aside SEOOPTIMISE.com is really one of the best. I got started off reading seoptimize a long time ago. Please if this is your first time here. Please Come back! :)
April 29th, 2010 at 7:28 am
Marketingseo
There is obviously no dividing line
May 14th, 2010 at 7:42 pm
Build good content and success will follow.
May 17th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
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May 19th, 2010 at 2:07 am
A very enlightening list! I have to admit, while building an understanding of search engine optimization I’ve used one or two of these tactics since I got started, but in the 90′s the search engines were far more gullible and the ‘black hat’ label didn’t exist. It was just you against the search engine…
June 2nd, 2010 at 12:07 am
“It’s the same dilemma as in sports though: When everybody cheats how are you going to win? That’s why reputable and successful SEO experts don’t have to use it.”
How much is it possible?
June 10th, 2010 at 7:32 am
great tips.. some of tips I will use further projects. Thanks!
June 24th, 2010 at 12:00 pm
Great list about black hat, but some of are useful in organic ranking and there will no any side effect. “Multiple subdomains” I don’t think so this is wrong way to promote website.
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July 22nd, 2010 at 5:50 pm
Amen JoeSchmoe, agreed.
Although the article is very very interesting. I think some of these techniques get used anyway, without even realising the SEO impact – jQuery tabs / accordians scream hidden text (ok not in the old sense, black text on black bg) but get put down to usability for readers…
I think you can use a lot of these techniques if you’re willing to stay close to the “ethical” line – and “ethical” is a matter of opinion anyway is it not?
July 27th, 2010 at 9:54 am
I knew before today only few techniques of black hat seo. But today i read here mostly all techniques. I am happy to gain this info from here and i saved this page in my blog
July 28th, 2010 at 5:34 am
Although the article is very very interesting. I think some of these techniques get used anyway, without even realising the SEO impact – jQuery tabs / accordians scream hidden text (ok not in the old sense, black text on black bg) but get put down to usability for readers…
August 14th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
Actually I Run a small Website Makers Company in India. I would like to know is bulk link building known as Black Hat SEO technique??
August 14th, 2010 at 5:24 pm
To use the old adage “cream always rises to the top” Black hat techniques are probably for the desperate who haven’t really got much that the public would want to buy anyway!
August 16th, 2010 at 8:18 am
@Linda, you may have a point then again I would also point to the analogy that, “Like a septic tank, all the big chunks float to the top.”
August 20th, 2010 at 7:33 am
fantastic tricks shared.
thanks for sharing.
August 22nd, 2010 at 8:21 pm
There is a few that was mossed in this great article. Here is mytocents i think black hat tricks are a good thing for a fresh web site with a new name but as the domain name gets a little age on it then start cutting back on the tricks and start with the white hat tricks then after a year or so you will have no black hat in the site and you will have a white hat based site with a good repeat visitor
August 23rd, 2010 at 6:18 am
Nice list. Here’s a list of popular linkbuilding methods using blackhat tools:
http://www.larrylim.net/seo-online-marketing/what-blackhat-seo/178/
August 23rd, 2010 at 6:29 am
[...] > Here’s a list of 30 blackhat SEO techniques (mostly on-page stuff) by SEOptimize [...]
August 25th, 2010 at 7:04 pm
Many of those aren’t Black Hat SEO, and many are outdated – there are a few of those that work pretty well, though. Cloaking, for example – there’s a myriad of ways to use cloaking beyond the serving separate landing pages (which doesn’t work any more).
Black Hat is often confused with automation, which is not at all unethical – just needs to be done correctly. If you automate generated text to build a large content library on your website, it doesn’t mean the content is bad, it’s just written in a more time-effective way.
White Hat enthusiasts just seem to think every bit of the web should be profound, thought provoking information. Sometimes people just need an address and directions.
August 29th, 2010 at 10:30 pm
I am still learning SEO and this is a great list. Thanks.