What is black hat SEO?
Short answer
Black hat SEO is any tactic that tries to raise rankings by breaking search engines' rules instead of earning the position. Common examples are bought links, hidden text, doorway pages, fake reviews and fake business listings. It can work for a while, and when it's caught, the penalty lands on the business and not on whoever did the work.
A tactic is black hat SEO when it breaks search engines’ rules to push a site or a business listing higher than it has earned. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Work done within the rules is sometimes called white hat. Google publishes its rules for websites as its spam policies, and separate rules for business profiles and for reviews. Black hat tactics are the ones those documents prohibit.
The common tactics
Each of these is against the rules, and I don’t use or recommend any of them.
| Tactic | What it is | What can happen |
|---|---|---|
| Bought links | Paying other sites to link to yours so the site looks more trusted than it is | The links are ignored, or the site is demoted or given a manual action |
| Hidden text | Keywords placed where visitors can’t see them, such as white text on a white background | The page or the whole site can lose its rankings |
| Doorway pages | Many near-identical pages made only to catch searches, each funneling to the same place | The pages are dropped from results, sometimes with the rest of the site |
| Fake reviews | Reviews written by people who were never customers, or paid for | Reviews removed, the profile restricted or suspended, and possible trouble under consumer protection rules |
| Fake listings | Business profiles at addresses where the business doesn’t operate, or names stuffed with keywords | Suspension, which can take the real listing down too |
Doorway pages and bought links each have a legitimate neighbor that is easy to confuse with them. A well-written page for a city you really serve isn’t a doorway page, which is the short answer to whether city pages count as doorway pages. A link earned from a local organization isn’t a bought link, so it sits outside the question of whether buying backlinks is worth it.
Why the risk is yours
The penalty attaches to the website and the profile, and those belong to the business. Google’s automated systems can discount the tactic or demote the site with no notice. A human reviewer can also apply what Google calls a manual action, which is reported inside Google Search Console. For a business profile, the response is usually a suspension, and a suspended profile doesn’t appear in the map results at all.
Recovery is slow and uncertain. Someone has to find and remove the bad links or pages and then make a request, and nobody can promise how Google will answer.
Why it still gets sold
It’s cheap to produce and can look like success at first. A batch of links or a set of copied city pages can lift a ranking for a time, and the report for that period looks good. The cost arrives later, often after the provider has changed. An owner is rarely told which tactics are in use, which is one reason a method that “can’t be explained” belongs on any list of warning signs.
How to check your own site
Google’s own tool will show you the most serious problems.
- In Google Search Console, open the manual actions report. If Google has applied one, it’s listed there with the reason.
- In the same tool, the links report shows which sites link to yours. A long list of unrelated sites you have never heard of is worth a question to whoever built them.
- Search Google Maps for your business name and look for listings you didn’t create.
- Ask your provider for a list of every link and page it has created. A provider working within the rules can hand that over.
Finding something doesn’t always mean your current provider did it. Links and pages can be left over from a provider years back. A technical SEO audit goes through the site page by page and records what is there, so cleanup starts from a full list.
What works instead
The alternative is slower and it holds: pages that answer what customers ask, a complete and accurate business profile, reviews from real customers, and links earned from real local relationships.