Black Hat SEO with its practices essentially exploits temporary weaknesses of the algorithm, giving – even temporarily – an advantage over the competition.
It does not follow what we know about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and its proper application, namely to follow some rules, to be on a certain path determined by the algorithm used by a search engine.
Black Hat SEO practices
One of the most common and widespread practices of Black Hat SEO is “Spam Comments” or “Unwanted Comments” if you prefer. If you already manage a site, you are likely to have come across irrelevant comments like the one in the image to your right.
This is a very widespread practice that is still used today. Special programs are used which are configured to search for sites, forums, blogs, etc., automatically create an account on them and then post prefabricatedtexts and links.
That the interested party exploits a very basic requirement for search engines which is called backlinks.
What are backlinks and why are they so important?
A backlink is a link that exists on a page and leads to another page outside the website. For example :
We just created a backlink for Google, on this page. In the real world, this happens often, people write articles or make comments and mention, recommend to others through backlinks they create – but without being pretentious -.
A search engine that will read through its algorithm that a page or a domain is mentioned, discussed, recommended, on many other pages, receives as a message that something good – important is happening on that domain or page. The backlinks that have been created for a page or a domain are an extremely strong signal for their evaluation.
So back when the quantity of backlinks mattered, someone crafty, could create thousands of backlinks in a few hours.
Giving a powerful signal for the domain or page they wanted to promote. A fictitious signal which until recently worked very well! This is why even today some ignorant people continue to follow this tactic in order to promote their pages.
At the beginning of the article we talked about “temporary weaknesses of the algorithm” and here is why it is not a very good idea to try to “deceive” the algorithm, the algorithm doesn’t remain stagnant, it is constantly evolving and improving as you can see in the Google algorithm update history.
So just when you thought quantity mattered and Black Hat SEO was temporarily winning, the algorithm evolved and now, not only does it value quality more but is also negatively affected where it does not find it or has the suspicion of “Spam Comments” or “Unwanted Comments”.
There are several practices like backlinks, there is no need to go into them further at this time.
What happens when Google discovers the use of Black Hat SEO practices?
As we have already mentioned, Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving, we said that it is not the number one search engine by chance, one of the first and serious updates that Google made was in February 2011 and was called Panda Update.
The Panda Update aimed to stop websites with low-quality content from appearing in Google’s top search results and brought truly shocking changes to the landscape of the results until then, pages that until recently – exploiting specific weaknesses of the algorithm – dominated the top search positions with hundreds of thousands of visitors per day, suddenly disappeared from the limelight!According to Google’s announcement, the changes brought about by the Panda Update affected 12% of its results in the U.S. Some of the pandalized pages that took the hit can be seen at www.pandalized.com
The consequences of using Black Hat SEO practice range from the fragmentation of the ranking that a page has for specific keywords – key phrases, up to the permanent exclusion of the site / domain from the Google results pages.