Black-hat SEO (search engine optimization) tactics just don’t cut it anymore.
Using old black-hat SEO strategies will not just guarantee that you get heavily penalized; you will also be wasting your precious time and resources.
But just in case some online marketers started out post Panda and Penguin and are wondering, what were these ancient black-hat SEO tricks?
It might be good to remind not just newbie Internet marketers, but everyone else, that the following can spell doom for your business.
Table of Contents
Buying Backlinks or Using Link Farms
What it is: Purchasing backlinks or participating in networks designed solely to pass link juice.
Why it’s risky: Google sees this as a clear violation of its search engine guidelines. Sites can get manual penalties or algorithmic suppression.
Example:
You pay $50 for 500 backlinks from random blogs with no relevance to your niche. They may appear overnight, but your search rankings quickly drop when Google catches on.
As the name implies, link buying helps you rank your site by paying for links.
A significant part of SEO is establishing link popularity to measure the credibility and authority of the site. By linking from authoritative and highly credible sites, newer ones would see increases in authority and search engine rankings.
Because linking from big sites such as Mashable, Inc.com, WSJ.com, etc., could be very hard to accomplish, enterprising individuals devised a way to offer smaller sites a fighting chance by getting linked from tons of sites to boost rankings and organic search traffic.
Major search engines tried to weed out this kind of cheating even before Google Penguin waddled on the scene. But because Google and other search engines had been lenient in the past, a lot of people got caught engaging in this unethical online practice.
If you ever come across a site that offers link-building services, be sure to investigate what sort of link building they do.
Do this instead: Build backlinks by publishing high-quality content, digital PR, or personalized outreach to relevant sites.
Over-Optimized Anchor Text
What it is: Overusing exact-match anchor text (e.g., “best SEO services”) in backlinks or internal links, particularly when done in unnatural ways.
Example:
If every single inbound link to your site uses the anchor “cheap SEO services,” that’s a red flag. It looks manipulative, not organic.
Why it’s risky: Google’s Penguin update targeted this specific issue. Over-optimized anchor text patterns are often associated with link spam and can result in devaluation of your backlink profile.
What to do instead:
Diversify your anchor text. Use branded anchors, naked URLs, and natural-sounding phrases. The goal is to make links appear editorial and helpful—not forced.
Cloaking & Sneaky Redirects
What it is: Showing one version of a page to search engines and a different one to users, or redirecting users deceptively.
Why it’s risky: It’s a form of deception. Google calls this out specifically and penalizes sites accordingly.
Example:
You build a page optimized for “free email templates” and show that to Google, but users are redirected to a sales page for unrelated software.
When a webmaster serves different content to a visitor from what the search engines see, that is known as cloaking. It should be obvious to anyone that this is downright deceitful.
How does someone do this? Simple.
The webmaster can direct his web server to provide information based on who requests it. Different information is provided to requests that come from web browsers as opposed to those from search engines.
Pretty neat . . . but extremely dangerous.
The intent of cloaking is to hide the real purpose of a page from the search engines, obviously. The page could actually turn out to be a spammy sales site that offers very little value after pretending to be a text-based version for the benefit of search engine spiders. But they discover the truth eventually.
Do this instead: Be transparent with your redirects and user experience. Always serve the same content to both users and bots.
Keyword Stuffing
What it is: Repeating the same keyword unnaturally throughout a page.
Why it’s risky: It creates a poor user experience and signals manipulation to search engines. Google may demote your rankings or deindex the page entirely.
Example:
“Looking for the best dog food for dogs? Our dog food is the best dog food because our dog food is made for dogs that need dog food.”
This is an age-old spam tactic that even the oblivious newbie may fall for. By keyword stuffing, black hatters cram the page with keywords to make it look very relevant to the eyes of the search engine spiders.
The goal of keyword stuffing is to place as many exact-match keywords as possible throughout the content to make it look very relevant to search. Search engines are becoming smarter by transitioning into latent semantic indexing (LSI), which is making keyword stuffing largely irrelevant.
Plus, to the discriminating reader, keyword-stuffed pages are hard to read and often just annoying.
While keyword-optimizing a content is still crucial, webmasters and SEOs should observe best practices for post algo-update SEO. Above all, remember to write for the reader, not for the search engines, and traffic will flow naturally to your site.
Do this instead: Focus on writing naturally. Use variations of your keyword and answer user intent.
Hiding Text
For the newbie, the only way for search engine spiders to determine what a page is all about is by reading texts.
Got that? The search engine spiders are programmed to read texts, but not to determine visuals. We’re not sure how long it will be before search engines come up with a technology that enables spiders to recognize images. But it’s probably in the works.
At least until recently, it was quite easy to trick the spiders by hiding texts within images. This fooled them into recognizing an image based on the underlying texts.
One of the more common black hat SEO tactics was to hide the texts completely from readers by using font colors that matched the page’s theme.
Even if you get away with hidden texts, you won’t get very far. The search engines are becoming more sophisticated about spotting hidden texts. The competition is also becoming more vigilant in watching for dubious content.
Strive always to provide value by producing sincere content that is free from any form of deceit. The search engines, as well as your readers, will love and reward you for it.
Ignoring Technical SEO
What it is: Letting technical issues pile up—like broken links, poor mobile experience, missing meta tags, slow load times, or not using HTTPS.
Example:
A blog with excellent articles but takes 12 seconds to load on mobile, has dozens of 404 errors, and no sitemap.
Why it’s risky: Search engines consider technical performance when ranking sites. A poor user experience—even with great content—can cause lower crawl rates, indexing issues, or drops in rankings.
What to do instead:
Invest in regular technical SEO audits. Use tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and PageSpeed Insights. Prioritize fast, mobile-friendly, secure websites with clean architecture.
Duplicate or Thin Content
What it is: Using copied content from other sites or publishing pages with little to no original information.
Why it’s risky: Duplicate content can dilute your SEO efforts, confuse search engines, and result in indexing issues. Thin content is often devalued entirely.
Example:
An ecommerce store copies product descriptions from the manufacturer’s site across hundreds of product pages. None of it is original or value-added.
Do this instead: Create unique, in-depth content tailored to your audience’s needs. Use canonical tags when necessary.
Spammy Backlinks: Low Quality Guest Posts or PBN (Private Blog Networks) Links
What it is: Publishing articles just for links on irrelevant or low-quality sites or PBNs (private blog networks).
Why it’s risky: Google now devalues links from poor-quality guest posts and penalizes PBNs entirely.
Example:
Submitting a poorly written article about “insurance tips” to a general lifestyle blog that covers everything from dog grooming to smoothie recipes.
There’s a risk to allowing visitors to create profiles and leave comments on your site. It could become a channel that harbors spam messages and links to offending sites, which in turn raises red flags, and as a result, can hurt your ranking.
Blogging and other activity in social media are crucial to get you and your followers involved in meaningful interactions, but your site’s reputation could take a negative hit if you fail to manage your social community properly.
Encourage your visitors to participate in conversations with you and the rest of the community, but screen every comment religiously. A good way to filter site comments is to approve each of them manually.
Also, it’s wise to make sure your blog commenting section is set to “nofollow” on outbound links.
Keep your site clean by diligently checking links that online comments include to point to other sites. Be sure that none of the links they leave point to “bad neighborhoods.”
Keep in mind that search engines watch for sites that have relationships with these “bad neighborhoods,” because they are keen to keep the Internet free from unwanted and spammy information.
Do this instead: Write for real audiences on authoritative websites. Prioritize value and relevance.
Spammy Structured Data Markup
What it is: Adding schema markup to a page to gain rich snippets in search—like star ratings or FAQs—when that information isn’t actually present or truthful.
Example:
You add schema markup for 5-star reviews to a landing page that has no reviews on it.
Why it’s risky: Misusing structured data violates Google’s guidelines and can result in a rich snippet removal or a manual penalty. Worse, it erodes user trust if what they see in search doesn’t match what they get on your site.
What to do instead:
Only mark up content that’s visible to users and relevant to the page. Follow Google’s structured data guidelines closely and validate your markup using their testing tools.
Automated, GenAI or Spun Content
What it is: Using software to spin articles by replacing words with synonyms or generating content with AI and publishing it without review.
Example:
“Top notch window cleaning is bestest choice for window clear. Our company give clean window at low money.”
Further examples include the overuse of generative AI in the scaling up of your on-site content. Semi-famed link builder and SEO Julian was hit by a spam update aimed at curbing AI content.
Why it’s risky: Spun content is easy for search engines to detect and often unreadable. It leads to high bounce rates, poor engagement, and ultimately, poor rankings. Google’s search engine algorithms increasingly reward expertise and originality.
What to do instead:
If you use AI tools, always human-edit the output for tone, accuracy, and clarity. Focus on creating useful content that solves real problems for your audience.
Conclusion
SEO is a long-term investment. Chasing quick wins through shady tactics will only lead to setbacks, penalties, or deindexation.
The good news?
Playing by the rules and focusing on quality content, smart linking, and user-first SEO practices still works—and it pays off big.
Whether we like it or not, Google still calls the shots. As long as we play by their rules (which are, in most cases, beneficial to everyone online), we should be doing fine.
If you have questions on proper link-building strategies, contact us and we would be delighted to discuss them with you.
Want more information on link building? Head over to our comprehensive guide on link building here: SEO Link Building: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide
Or, if you would like information on surviving and/or preparing for the next Google update, click here.
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