What is black hat and why is it bad?

If you're gaming the system to increase the rank of your page by means that attempt to "trick" google's algorithm in your favor than you are using black hat tactics.

The keyword here is "trick".

The general idea with white, grey, and black hats are:

White Hat: You are following everyone's rules and are not at any risk of legal trouble, site de-indexing, etc. This is the hardest way to make big money, but is the most stable once you accomplish it. Regarding SEO specifically, this would typically mean you are only doing on-page optimizations per Google's guidelines, getting natural links because of your great content, maybe do some social activities, etc.

Grey Hat: You are not doing anything "illegal" that can land you in jail, and in general you are being White Hat, but sometimes you are breaking someone's rules to help you make more money, so there is some risk of losing accounts, being banned from using a site or service, possibly being sued if you cause financial damage to someone's business as a result of your activities, or in the case of SEO, your site being de-indexed. Usually these risks are very minimal and unlikely to happen if you are really being grey hat and keeping the rule breaking to a minimum. Sometimes you might even be able to just manipulate the rules a bit without actually breaking them.

Black Hat: You are blatantly breaking 1 or more rules or even laws in some cases. Law breaking would be pretty rare with SEO, but can still be possible depending on what you are doing. When using black hat tactics, you would normally remain as anonymous as possible, use throw-away domains that can quickly be replaced, maintain multiple accounts if necessary, and basically just try to game the system as best as you can to make some quick (and sometimes huge) money.

These are just general definitions, you will often find people referring to something as black hat if it's anything non-standard or against any rules at all, but then there are other people that will call it grey hat. Basically white hat is being as "good" as possible and black hat is being as "bad" as possible, and grey hat is somewhere in the middle, lol.

Using black hat SEO doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have relevant content, but it does mean you’re cool with cheating and breaking the rules – and if you get caught as the search engine algorithms wise up to your tricks, your website could end up in the search engine jailhouse.

Black Hat SEO definition: Black hat SEO is a practice that increases a page's rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines' terms of service.



Why it’s bad: Not only does it create a ton of low value articles that don’t make any sense when read, it also will get you penalized by the search engines. We have seen numerous sites try article spinning to spam the search results and manipulate the link graph, and each of them had their primary website either penalized, or banned from the search results.

Well usually blackhat techniques are just quick fixes that do not last. Why would you risk the integrity of your business for a quick seo solution? This is why most legit business only accept white hat seo for their link building efforts.

It's not illegal by any means.

The bad side of it is, you are doing something to artifically make Google think your site is more popular than it really is.If they catch you, they penalize your site.

Good part is - it takes a lot less time to rank.

Black hat SEO is a practice that increases a website’s rank in search engines by violating the search engines' terms of service. It is bad because implementing such practice could get your site banned from search engines. On the other hand some black hat strategies are really effective in helping you achieve short-term SEO goals. But if you want a long-lasting business, you wouldn’t want to use this strategy to improve your search engine rankings.

Black hat SEO means doing SEO by some automated tools like scrapebox,SenukeX etc... Just to get more backlinks people used to do black hat technique. But Google has changed the algorithm few years back, doing black hat technique is strictly prohibited... Main reason to consider black hat technique is bad is it generates lots of irrelevant links, previously it was not a big problem. But after the new updates like Google penguin & Google panda most of the SEO firms avoided using this techniques and started concentrating on White hat SEO which is pure manual organic SEO....

Those tricks which are using to get website on top position on google serp in short terms these are using in wrong ways and google does not like these.

Black hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines guidelines.

Blackhat is certainly faster and more hassle-free. Still remember the days where you could just mass blast your site with bad backlinks and go to the top for some keywords... But when Google strikes you...

Today SEO is about great content, good inbound links, and good on page optimization.
If you deviate from these three things, you are moving out of white hat and into black hat.
Hope what i shared will help you in some way. Cheers.

Some examples of black hat techniques here Techniques Black Hat SEO - Part 1 - SEO Montreal | BlackCat SEO

If it works on the long-run, it's not necesseraly 'white' : it could be a strong 'black' as well

Great content is still what matters today. If in 2015 you are going to spam your site with 15.000 blog comments from XRummer then probably you will just end destroying your site. You can get a manual action from Google and de-indexed and that's the point of no return. Doesn't matter what you do, your site is buried.

I prefer making lengthy quality and useful content. That way you will get natural organic links too. And of course, you can still have a link-building strategy and make your own links. Just make then natural and diversify a lot.

I do not think black hat SEO is illegal .. It is like cheating during an exam ..it is unethical .. However, hacking for example might be used for black hat SEO .. that is illegal