Here is a list of black hat SEO tactics that Google penalizes. Check your website content and refrain from the prohibited SEO practices outlined in Google Search Essentials (formerly known as Google Webmaster Guidelines).
Learn more about Google SEO Algorithms.
- Black Hat SEO Tactics: Unethical and manipulative schemes used to gain ranking in search engines. Any tactic not per Google Search Essentials will result in a violation.
- Link Schemes: Link farming activities such as excessively spamming links without real content.
- Buy and Sell Links: Google bans schemes such as buying and selling links.
- Overusing Anchor Links with Keywords: Overusing and repeating highly keyword-optimized anchor links within the content.
- Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing content in an attempt to fool search engines.
- Irrelevant Keywords: Repeating low-value or unrelated keywords to trick search engines for ranking.
- Scam Redirects: Redirecting visitors to a different URL than the intended webpage for deceiving purposes.
- Cloaking: Misleading visitors by sending them to websites with mismatched URLs than what the anchor link text initially states.
- Hidden Text and Links: Purposely making keywords and links invisible or hidden to manipulate search engines.
- Doorway Pages: Creating multiple similar websites with slight variations to rank for specific keywords and mislead visitors to low-value content.
- Scraped Content: Plagiarizing, copying, stealing, or direct translating other people’s content and calling it your own. Scraping content can also result in copyright infringement.
- Automatically Generated Content: Spammy content automatically created by programs, with the exception of relevant AI-generated content. Google has exceptions around AI-generated content. It is not considered spam as long as it delivers value and provides meaningful answers to search queries.
- Low-value Content: Filler content that is short, repetitive, and does not offer value.
- Content Farming: Websites that produce a massive amount of low-value content to manipulate search engines into evaluating them as information-rich. Google removes all content farming websites.
- Duplicate Pages and Content: Multiples of the same webpages containing the same content. Sometimes duplicated pages unintentionally result from improper CMS (Content Management System) practices. To avoid this, use Canonical Tag to claim the original webpage as the master page. This helps Google understand that the duplicated webpages exist as related content to the master page.
- Pages with Malicious Behavior: Forced download of files, viruses, malware, ad spam, or automatically changing visitor’s browser settings.
- User-Generated Spam: Trolling comments with spam, spamming content on webpages, falsified systems, or browser warnings.
