Black-hat link building refers to using spammy or shady methods to build backlinks. Those methods often violate Google’s guidelines, leading to a possible drop in rankings, either due to a manual penalty or an automatic algorithm demotion.
While link building is crucial for your SEO strategy, it is important to do it correctly. In this article, we’ll be talking about black-hat link building.
I will explain what it is, why people do it, and how to avoid doing it yourself. I will also give you some examples of black-hat link building, so you know what to look for.
Let’s get into it.
What is black hat SEO?
The term black-hat is a broader term that applies to any SEO technique that is spammy or violates Google’s guidelines. For example, spinning content or stuffing your content with keywords to try to get better rankings are two common black-hat SEO methods.
Some more advanced black-hat SEO tactics can include using invisible text on your pages with hidden keywords, cloaking content, or creating doorway pages for the purpose of ranking for one keyword while sending users to a different page.
What is black hat link building?
Black-hat link building refers to spammy link-building methods that often go against Google’s guidelines. For example, paying for a link is not allowed, according to Google’s policies. While you can pay an agency to use white-hat methods to obtain backlinks, paying for a backlink directly is a big no-no.
Let’s go through some more examples of black-hat link building.
Link farms
Link farms are websites, or a network of websites, that were built for the sole purpose of providing backlinks. Usually, you pay a flat rate for a certain number of backlinks from those types of sites.
Link farm sites are usually extremely low-quality. They are often new, have zero to almost no original content, and may even use plagiarized content to fill up their pages.
The worst part is that not only do they link back to your site, but they link to dozens or hundreds of other sites as well — perhaps even to your competitors.
Link exchanges
While you can collaborate with other sites, write guest posts for them, and even accept a guest post in return occasionally, giving other sites links in exchange for links back to your site (and doing this excessively) is a strategy you should avoid.
The exact wording Google uses in its guidelines when referring to this technique is, “Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking.”
Private blog networks
A private blog network is a network of blogs you set up yourself with the purpose of linking back to your main site from each blog. They are hosted on different servers to avoid detection by Google and to make them appear like unrelated sites. However, if Google figures out what you are doing, they will probably penalize your site.
Buying links or articles
I already mentioned that you can’t buy links. However, even paying for a high-quality article published on another site (also known as native advertising) with a do-follow link back to your site in that article may also violate Google’s guidelines.
Links in headers, footers, and widgets
Inserting links into a widget distributed on various sites can also violate Google’s policies. An example would be if you create a plugin with a widget that serves some purpose, such as tracking the number of visitors on the site, and that widget provides a backlink to your site from each site it is installed on.
Getting backlinks from headers and footers can also be problematic.
Avoid getting links from low-quality sites
Even if you are not using any of the methods listed as prohibited in Google’s guidelines, you still need to make sure you are only getting links from high-quality sites. For example, when doing guest post outreach, don’t reach out to:
- New sites
- Sites with thin content
- Sites with plagiarized or spun content
- Sites with too many outbound links or affiliate links
- Sites that have a bad user experience (too many ads, pop-ups, self-playing videos, not optimized for mobile, etc.)
- Sites that are not relevant to your niche
It’s important to understand the difference between a Google penalty and an automatic drop in rankings. A Google penalty is handed out by a human reviewer who reviews your backlink profile and decides that you were using black-hat methods.
An automatic demotion in rankings, however, can come when Google’s algorithms think your site is low-quality or detect backlinks that may be suspicious. A lot of backlinks from low-quality sites, even if you used white-hat methods to obtain them, can lead to Google’s algorithm demoting your site.
Why you need to avoid black hat link building
Back in 2012, Google released an algorithm update dubbed Google Penguin. Its goal was to weed out sites that used manipulative link-building methods from the search results.
Before Penguin, ranking a site was pretty easy. All you had to do was hire someone or use a bot to create massive amounts of links. While it may sound unbelievable today, it actually worked!
Penguin changed all that. While backlinks are still one of the top SEO factors, as they show Google that our site is informative and popular, Google now looks at the quality of the linking site, instead of only the number of links you have.
Many sites that used black-hat link-building techniques saw a huge drop in rankings and lost a lot of traffic when Penguin came out. That includes some famous sites, like JCPenney.
That’s not to say that the quantity of backlinks doesn’t matter anymore. Quantity still matters, but it is no longer the sole deciding factor.
Final thoughts on black hat SEO
Don’t fall for black-hat SEO vendors who promise quick rankings. Many use link farms and other black-hat methods to build massive amounts of backlinks. That might work for a short while, but Google’s algorithms will eventually catch up with you.
Instead, use a trusted agency that uses only white-hat methods and gets backlinks from high-quality sites with high Domain Authority rankings.
These agencies use tactics such as guest posting and broken link building to obtain high-quality links. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help, check out our link-building services.
