What Is Black Hat Link Building?

Alright, Let’s discuss your question “What is Black-Hat Link building?”.

Before delving into the subject, let us understand what is meant by Black-hat SEO techniques. Any technique which might manipulate the way a webpage ranks on the search engine results pages (SERPs) can give an advantage to the host. However, not all the ways of manipulation could be called as black-hat SEO technique.

The techniques were guidelines, rules, and norms that have been broken or taken undue advantage of could be called black-hat SEO techniques. These guidelines are mostly provided by search engines and have been built over the years.

Now, let us understand what link building is. A website might be an authority, reputed and credible figure in its own field of enterprise. This may be possible because the website hosts good quality, unique and well-researched content.

So, it may be possible that other websites provide a reference to the pages of this ‘authority’ website. This website now gains a lot of links pointing to it from other websites.

Such links are called backlinks. In the eyes of a search engine, such an ‘authority’ website becomes valuable. The number of genuine quality ‘organic’ links can get this website to rank higher on the SERPs.

But the gaining of such organic links takes time. It is not as if some new website suddenly gets referenced from other websites.

It takes time and perseverance for a website to naturally gain links and becomes established as an authority figure in a niche subject. Search engines evaluate the number of references a website gets from other sites.

And, among other factors, the number of backlinks also helps in determining a website’s SERP rankings. Usually, search engines now look at the authentic, relevant backlinks a website has naturally earned.

With the above definitions and discussions in mind, we can now easily understand what Black-hat link-building techniques are. Such techniques are deployed to manipulate the number of backlinks a website accumulates.

Through such techniques, a website may try to get as many backlinks as possible in a shorter amount of time. This can help the website to rank higher in SERP and get more traffic and hence more potential revenue.

This is just like manipulating the way search engines rank pages based on the number of backlinks, but here, unethical means are used.

Initially, the search engines looked for the number of backlinks, but with the passage of time, search engines got smarter. They now look for the quality and the relevance of the backlinks which a website acquires.

In case, a website used black-hat link-building techniques, the search engine penalizes them. This is done by lowering the rank or by banning a website from rankings for searches.

It might also be possible that in a short term, these manipulative practices go unnoticed by the search engines. But in the longer term, the algorithmic updates of the search engines would notice such malpractices and penalize such actions.

For instance, the Google algorithm updates Google Penguin, Google Panda, etc., and does this job regularly so that search engines can serve users in the best possible way, i.e. to help users find out the best results for their query.

Such black-hat techniques are not there to enhance the user experience or satisfy him, but simply to boost the page rankings for a site. All the link building is done in a way to manipulate the search engine rankings.

Black hat link-building techniques are many. Some of them have been discussed below.

• One strategy is based on the spam-oriented link-building technique. In this, comments and links are posted on other third-party sites. Generally, the posted link has less to do with or irrelevant to the content on the page on which it is listed. (Search Engines flag such practices and an imminent lowering of the page rank is there.)
• Creation of link-farms is another tactic. A link farm is basically a website that hosts a series of links to other websites. These link-farm websites usually don’t have any worthy content, or they don’t have content with much inherent value.Their content is usually copied or thin or dummy in nature. The sole purpose of their existence is to provide links. The owners of such websites might do this in return of some material favour or for money.

Many times, some link farms might look legitimate. But it might be a ruse. Their efforts may be to look genuine and original, but ultimately, they are involved in efforts to drive traffic to certain pages.

• Another tactic may be link-buyback. In this method, backlinks are exchanged or bought from websites. For instance, if website A promises to provide links to website B and vice-versa, this can be considered as a link-exchange.Or if website A offers some amount of money or incentive to website B to host its link, then it can be called as link-buying. It is not always necessary that the links provided might be relevant to the host website’s (the website which is hosting the link) content.
• Another technique is creating a Private Blog network. In this, people create several obscure private blogs. These blogs exist only to provide a link back to our target or main website. This way, a series of private blogs increase the number of backlinks to a website.

Creating a series of websites or private blogs and their content on a regular basis is a time taking and laborious task. Even if the search engine algorithms are not able to detect this tactic, the hassle alone makes the task an onerous and unworthy one.

Search Engines want websites to rank well in search results. Their ranks should be by the virtue of their merit, uniqueness, labor, and all that goes into ‘earning’ natural organic links and not because these websites can throw around some money to buy links. Search Engines don’t want link which adds no value but exist solely to boost a website’s or a company’s rankings.

The search engines don’t police the websites merely for fun, because if they don’t, the deteriorating user experience might force users to use other search engines (which provide a far more satisfactory search result to its users).