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.

Black Hat SEO

In this article, you'll learn:

What Black Hat SEO is
Tactics and techniques that qualify as Black Hat SEO
How to report Black Hat SEO
How Black Hat SEO can affect you and your website
It's crucial to realize that implementing Black Hat SEO tactics and strategies can get your site banned from search engines, excluding you from the number one traffic referral source on the Internet. All SEO's need a proper understanding of Black Hat SEO and its consequences.

What Is Black Hat SEO, Anyway?

Black Hat SEO is most commonly defined as a disapproved practice that nevertheless could increase a page's ranking in a search engine result page (SERP). These practices are against the search engine's terms of service and can result in the site being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites. A list of tactics and strategies employed by black hat SEO practitioners have been openly denounced on Google's Webmaster Guidelines and Bing's Webmaster Guidelines.

"Is the work that I'm doing adding value to the user or am I just doing this for search engines to see?" is a litmus test on whether an SEO tactic would go against a search engine's webmaster guideline. If no value is added to the user, but rankings are likely to increase, then your decisions are highly likely to be black hat. The same test can be applied to to paid search practices to determine whether an activity is considered black hat ppc.