The world of SEO is more brutal than one can imagine. While most marketers and SEO experts use the white hat approach, there are some that simply don’t buy into Google’s “propaganda”. This specific portion of the SEO community wants to rank as fast and possible to drive more traffic and revenue to their sites. That’s basically what black SEO is all about.
What is Black Hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is an approach that is a turnaround to everything you thought you knew about SEO. Black hat SEO tactics go against Google’s policies and guidelines. But still, these strategies are just as sophisticated as white hat tactics. The key difference between the two is that black hat SEO does not bother with the value it gives off to search engine users. It offers value only to the website it’s ranking for.
The black hat SEO philosophy is that these practices see Google as a business. Therefore, rather than conforming to the wants and needs of Google, the black hat SEO practitioners rank sites the way they know how, hence challenging the status quo in SEO. By learning how Google’s algorithms work, they develop tactics that enable site pages to rank on top of organic search results. Whether or not these methods are questionable doesn’t matter as long as they achieve the desired goals.
The Pros and Cons of Black Hat SEO
While black hat SEO is generally viewed in a negative light, it cannot be denied that it is one of the most successful approaches that offers many benefits. That said, there are also certain risks involved in this approach. Follow are some pros and cons of black hat SEO:
Pro: Faster Results
Unlike white hat SEO that takes a lot of resources and time to get your website to rank on top of its target keyword, the black hat SEO approach is much faster. For a reasonable target keyword, it provides results in a matter of months, if not weeks.
Pro: Automated Process
The automated process is another advantage of black hat SEO. It saves a lot of time, unlike white hat SEO that requires you to assemble a team in order to help you perform content creation, link building, blogger outreach, and other tactics to help raise the search rankings of your site. With black hat SEO, all you need are a few tools that you can set and forget.
Con: Permanent Google Penalization
The purpose of Google is to offer search users with quality content in the form of search results. Their intention is to clean up spam and websites that are caught practising negative approaches as part of their SEO strategy. So, as expected, Google handles black hat SEO cases very seriously. If you are caught using this approach, it will penalize your website from ranking for a very long time, if not forever.
Also read: Common Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid in 2021
Con: You Are Never Safe from Google
Another major con of using black hat SEO tactics is that you have to always watch your back for Google to penalize your websites. Over time, the anti-spam team of Google has smartened up and it’s slowly weeding out the majority of black hat SEO tactics. Because of this, you will need to be more vigilant and think outside the box when implementing your tactics.
Black hat SEO is a fascinating world especially when you consider how SEO is generally perceived. Hopefully, the above-listed information helped you understand what all the fuss is about black hat SEO and why some people prefer this approach.