SEO is a fierce zero-sum game war.
That’s why some business owners resort to black-hat tactics to topple competitors from the top of the SERPs.
While there are some black-hat SEO tactics you clearly shouldn’t use, like hacking (because it’s illegal), others seem less risky. But even the ones that look like they might be worth it are frankly never a good idea for legitimate businesses—so you should avoid them at all costs.
In this article, we’ll cover six common black-hat SEO tactics and what to do instead:
Buying links
Keyword stuffing
Blog comment spam
Article spinning
Negative SEO
Rich snippets spam
1. Buying links
Buying links means paying another website to link to your website.
Payment for links can be money, goods, or services.
Buying links is bad on many levels:
It’s a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google explains this here.
It can lead to a Google penalty. Google will penalize your site if they catch you selling or buying links. Some SEOs question how good Google’s algorithm is at sniffing out paid links, but the truth is they’re getting better at it all the time. So while they might not identify them all, chances are some links you buy will at best have no effect and, at worst, hurt your rankings.
Paid links are expensive. $361.44 on average, according to our 2018 case study.
SIDENOTE. Buying links isn’t illegal. Many would argue that it isn’t unethical either. So although it’s not something we recommend for legitimate businesses, it’s okay to do it if you understand and are willing to take the associated risks.
What should you do instead?
Link outreach.
This is where you create a valuable resource, then reach out to the owner of a website you want a link from and give them a compelling reason to link to it.
If that sounds easy, it isn’t. Getting results from link outreach is hard. It’s only even remotely likely to work when you have a great resource, great prospects, and a great outreach email.
That said, a great way to get started with this approach is to use the icing on the cake technique:
Dividing the workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on their strengths. The improvements are similar on desktop and mobile. Most of the focus in 2021 was on mobile results.
Create a useful resource.
Find pages that your resource will complement.
Pitch your resource to the site owners.
Let’s look at an example…
Say you’ve created a curated list of resume templates. This is a valuable resource, so the next step is to find pages that your resource will complement. In this case, that might be posts about “how to write a resume.” After all, a guide to writing a resume is good, but a guide to writing a resume with templates is arguably even better.
You can find these pages super easily in Content Explorer, a searchable database of billions of web pages. Here’s how:
Go to Content Explorer
Search for title:"topic" -"what your page is about"
Toggle One page per domain on
For example, if you search for title:“how to write a resume” -“templates”, you’ll see over two thousand posts about writing resumes that don’t mention anything about templates: