BLACK HAT

TECHNIQUES
 BLACK HAT MARKETING

• Black hat marketing is the use of unethical (and sometimes, but not always, illegal)

strategies to promote online business.

• In contrast to ethical “white hat” strategies, black hat strategies use deception and

manipulation to accomplish their objectives

 WHO EMPLOYS BLACK HAT MARKETING TECHNIQUES?

• While established companies interested in protecting their reputations avoid black

hat marketing practices, smaller and newer firms—including the Internet equivalent

of “fly-by-night” businesses—may use it to get quick results or to establish a

presence in the market. 

• Black hat marketing tactics most commonly refers to Search Engine Optimisation

(SEO) techniques. 
 USE CASE & EXAMPLE

• Black Hat Techniques try to “trick” the search engines into awarding a higher
ranking—even when that means giving users something entirely different from what
they want. 

• A user searching for “five-star restaurant” hopes to get results showing those
exceptional restaurants. But a black hat SEO company can get a completely
different type of website to show up on page one of the search results—such as one
selling cars, media, or anything else (including restaurants).
However, when searches return results that don’t satisfy the
user, the reputation of the search engine suffers. Thus,
Google, Yahoo, and all the other search engines constantly
update their search algorithms to avoid selecting websites
using black hat techniques; and when they identify an
offending website, they remove them from their results.
Therefore companies who use black hat marketing can only
hope to get short-term payoffs, followed by long-term
consequences.
 IN ADDITION TO SEO…
• Cookie stuffing: Legitimate affiliate marketing uses cookies to track when an affiliate’s link is
clicked on, in order to pay a commission to the source of the referral. A black hat affiliate marketer
will secretly load users’ computers with fraudulent cookies even when they do not click on a link.
The tactic is illegal, and can result in huge fines—but until that time, it results in thousands of
referrals.

• Scraper blogs (splogs): Blogs can be created with no original content, by “scraping” (copying)
content from other websites. Basically, this requires stealing articles and other content from other
publishers, in order to create a blog that can generate traffic to command more advertising revenue.

• Social media manipulation: Websites can install widgets that force visitors to automatically “like”
or share the website on their Facebook or other social media accounts. Users who have their
accounts so hijacked are generally upset; but by that time, all their contacts have already received
the advertisement.
SOME BLACK HAT
TECHNIQUES
 HIDDEN CONTENT 

• There will be content stuffed with keywords within the content of the website. The
content here will not be visible to the end users. Use the comment tags to create
the hidden content. The commenting tags are used a reminder on what exactly a
piece of code does. The use of the non-script tags on the page is another great way
to have hidden content on your website. A non-script tag, in all cases, tells the user
that a script is running on the website but the browser they are using does not
support the script. The two approaches are used in a bid to promote hypothetical
page targeting a particular keyword in mind.
 COMMENT TAG

<!--This is a comment. Comments are not displayed in the browser-->


 NO SCRIPT TAG

<script>

document.write("Hello World!")

</script>

<noscript>Your browser does not support JavaScript!</noscript>
 HIDDEN CONTENT

• The colour of the text is same as that of the background

 KEYWORD STUFFING

• Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of filling your content with irrelevant
keywords in an attempt to manipulate where the page ranks on search results
pages. Adding multiple variations of keywords where they add no value creates a
bad experience for users. It may also cause your page to rank for irrelevant queries.
 GOOGLE’S DEF.

• Google explains keyword stuffing as:

• Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value.

• Blocks of text listing cities and states a web page is trying to rank for

• Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural.

 EXAMPLE

“We are in the business of selling outbound marketing software. Outbound marketing

software is what we sell. If you are thinking of getting outbound marketing
software get in touch with one of our outbound marketing software consultants.”
 META KEYWORD STUFFING 

• You can find the Meta tags within the head tag page of a website’s page. They are
quite relevant for improving the ranking of a particular website’s page on a search
engine. A little more care can help you use the Meta description efficiently to
improve your ranking on search engine. Only use the Meta description to describe
the content of your page concisely, honestly and precisely. It should be one, two or
three sentences at most.
WHERE IN WORDPRESS
 GATEWAY PAGES 

• These are search engine designed pages, not user designed. The end user will not
see these pages because they are automatically redirected to the targeted page of
your website. The gateway pages are fake pages. You could term them as fake
paths stuffed with content and highly optimized that links to a target or landing
page.
 CLOAKING

• Cloaking involves showing one piece of content to users and a different piece of
content to search engines. Websites practicing black hat SEO will do this in order to
make content rank for a variety of terms irrelevant to their content. Spam websites
will often do this to try and avoid a search engine bot finding out the spam content
they serve to users.

• The web server is specially programmed to return different content to search

engines than it returns to regular users, in an attempt to distort search engine
rankings by making a cloak content.
 STEPS

• Create a Page for Search Engine - On Page SEO as per the Search Engine

• Create a Page which you really want to show up

• Use Redirect to direct users to the page which you really want to show up

• Restrict this page from search engines to crawl, esp. GoogleBot

 HOW TO BLOCK A SPECIFIC PAGE 

FROM SEARCH ENGINES 

VIA ROBOT.TXT?
• To block a specific page, use the following example:



User-agent: *

Disallow: /directory/page

• If you want to target a specific user agent, such as Google Bot, do the following:



User-agent: googlebot

Disallow: /directory/page

Multipart Robot.txt Editor - Wordpress Plugin

HOW TO REDIRECT?

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
 LSI: LATENT SEMANTIC INDEXING

• LSI Keyword is keyword that is semantically linked to a main keyword. In a nutshell,

LSI keywords are keywords that we generally find related to a main keyword. In SEO
(search engine optimization) context, they are keywords that we should be using in
our content to help search engines understand our content better. In fact, LSI
keywords help you to increase your organic search engine traffic and improve your
ranking.

• For example, 'apple' and 'itunes' are LSI keywords because they share the same
context and are frequently found together. But they are not synonyms. Here are
some examples of how LSI works.

Study of Meaning in Language - Destination vs. Last Stop

 BENEFITS OF LSI KEYWORDS

• Helps to increases your content’s credibility

• Helps to decrease bounce rates

• Increase on-page time spent

• Rank better for related search results

• Rank higher without less competition

 LINK FARMS

• A link farm is a website or a collection of websites developed solely for the purpose
of link building. Each website links out to the site or sites they want to rank higher
on search engines. Search engines rank websites by looking at the number of links
that point to the website, among other factors. Black hat SEO exploits this by using
link farms to inflate the number of backlinks a particular site has.

• Link farms often have low-quality content and lots of links. The links normally
contain the keyword they want the site to rank for in the anchor text. 
 PRIVATE BLOG NETWORKS

• A private blog network (PBN) is a bunch of authoritative websites used solely for
link building. They are similar to link farms in that they both aim to exaggerate the
number of links pointing to a website. Each PBN site links to the site they want to
boost in the search results but do not link to each other.

• Buy Expired Domains - Build Content - Add Backlinks

 EXAMPLES OF BLACK HAT SEO
GROUPON’S BAIT AND SWITC H

• Groupon was accused of doing a bait and switch by San Francisco Comprehensive

Tours. The tour company ran a one of promotion with Groupon but the voucher
website continued to advertise the promotion on Google long after it had ended.
When searchers clicked on Groupon’s page there was no discount to be found as
the content had been swapped out. This bait and switch happened in a PPC
advertisement but they often happen on organic results too.
 FORBES SELLING LINKS

• Someone appearing to be from Forbes posted on the Google Webmaster Central

forum seeking help with a link violation notice. The notice asked Forbes to remove
unnatural links from their site’s content.

• Google’s Matt Cutts commented in the thread that he had confirmed multiple times
that paid links that pass PageRank. Cutts recommended that Forbes remove the
paid links that pass PageRank to have the penalty reversed. TechCrunch
reported that Forbes began to remove the paid links back in 2011 after receiving
the penalty.
 GOOGLE CHROME’S PAID LINK

• Even Google messes up their own SEO from time to time. On one occasion they
included a follow link in a sponsored post about Google Chrome. This falls under
black hat SEO as the link was included as part of sponsored content that was paid
for by the company. The Google webspam team applied a penalty
to www.google.com/chrome, reducing its Pagerank for a period of sixty days. The
black mark against Google Chrome caused them to drop in position on search
results for the term “browser”.
 PURCHASING REVIEWS

• Buying reviews from sites which sell fake reviews - Fiverr/ UpWork - for GMB, Yelp
and Facebook
 OVER-OPTIMIZED ALT DESCRIPTION
DONEC QUIS NUNC

• A little trickier than keyword stuffing, this technique is found by search engine
crawlers even though you burden your images with a lousy number of keywords
instead of your text (content). Ever if you can’t see them, it doesn’t mean it’s not
that harmful.
 HTML HEADING OVER-OPTIMIZING

• Using multiple H1s on a page is a widely spread tactic to influence on-site SEO.
Abusing this black hat technique makes your site look stuffed.

• Example on the next page

EXAMPLE
 CLICKBAIT

• Clickbait is an eye catching and deceptive headline written with the sole purpose of
making you click on it. It says one thing in the headline and another thing on the
site. It uses expressions to entice you such as “You won’t believe …” , “Important
news about …”, “Shocking!! You need to see this…” and so on and so forth. This
deceiving technique will decrease your CTR, and on the long run, it’s bad for your
site.
 BLOG COMMENT SPAM

• It occurs when you try to generate links by commenting on different blogs and sites
to link back to your blog/site, despite the fact that the sites are relevant or not to
your niche or activity profile.
 RICH SNIPPET MARKUP SPAM

• Structured markup data can be a great way of formatting how your site appears in
the search results when somebody looks for information. Also, it will help index your
site. On the other hand, if you are creating irrelevant rich snippets markup you risk
getting manually penalized by Google for this scammy technique.
 BUYING PAID LINKS

• Avoid buying Paid Links - Paid Links fall under the Back Hat SEO Techniques

• Except for The Hoth

 SOCIAL AUTOMATION TOOLS
• Instagram: Instagress

• G+: Circlescope

• Linkedin: Elink

• Twitter: Managedflitter and Twitter toolkit chrome extension

• Youtube: Tubebuddy

• Facebook: Facebook automation toolkit chrome extension

• Pinterest: NinjaPinner

• Tumblr: Tumbleniinja

• Email: Pitchbox