Black hat SEO refers to techniques and strategies used to get higher search rankings, and breaking search engine rules. Black hat SEO focuses on only search engines and not so much a human audience. White hat SEO refers to the use of techniques and strategies that target a human audience opposed to a search engine. Some black hat strategies include the following:


  • Unrelated keywords: Adding keywords that have no connection to your content is a red flag for search engines because of how unnatural it looks. Say you’re working on a site dedicated to fireplaces. Adding a sentence like, “Ryan Gosling would use our fireplace during his trip home to Canada” sounds great but really has nothing to do with how your product could benefit your target audience. Instead, it uses an unrelated celebrity to bait search engines – a big no-no.
  • Content automation (in the body text or the comment section): We can all recognise a bot comment instantly, and although this text contains one or two keywords that will help the URL rank higher, it’s randomly generated and makes absolutely no sense to the reader – and search engines pick up on this. 
  • Doorway pages: These are essentially fake pages that are overloaded with keywords that make them easier for search engines to find. However, once clicked, they automatically redirect visitors to a separate page and are therefore meaningless.
  • Cloaking: This deceptive strategy involves presenting visitors and search engines completely different content. The goal is to deceive search engines so they display a URL when it would not otherwise be displayed.
  • Invisible text or links: Another common black hat technique is to hide text or links within your content in an effort to improve rankings. Some ways to do this include adding white text on a white background, setting the font size to zero, or burying a link in a small character (e.g., embedding a link in a hyphen).


Black hat SEO is used to get your site ranking high on Google in a very short time and likely will drop off when Google change their algorithms. 

White hat SEO focusses on getting your site ranking high on Google with legitimate processes so it can stay there longer.


Keep in mind that these are all referred to as black hat techniques for a reason. They’re incredibly risky to implement and are usually detected sooner or later. Consequently, a site can be banned or penalised with a lower rank.