Black hat SEO refers to the practices used to increase the rank of a website in search engines by violating the search engines’ protocols. 

Why Should You Avoid Black Hat SEO? 

Violators who incorporate Black Hat SEO techniques to increase their site ranking are likely to get their website heavily penalized or de-indexed from Google and other search engines.

Though you might see a short-term success through a sudden spike in traffic to your site, once faced with a penalty, it can have devastating effects on your rankings.

Hence, it is extremely crucial for search engine optimisers to properly understand Black Hat SEO and its consequences.

Common Black Hat SEO Techniques

The following Black Hat SEO techniques should be avoided at all costs if you wish to stay onboard with Google and other search engines:

• Content Automation
• Pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing, viruses, trojans, and other malware
• Doorway Pages
• Keyword Stuffing
• Hidden Text or Links
• Cloaking
• Reporting a Competitor (or Negative SEO)
• Sneaky Redirects 
• Guest Posting Networks
• Link Schemes
• Article Spinning
• Link Manipulation (including buying links)
• Creating pages, subdomains, or domains with duplicate content
• Link Farms, Link Wheels or Link Networks
• Automated Queries to Google
• Rich Snippet Markup Spam

How To Report Black Hat SEO to Google

If your website has been attacked through a malicious hack, virus or negative SEO campaign of spammy links, or you see spammy web results on a competitive keyword your website is ranking on, you need to report to Google.

In case of spammy web results on a competitive keyword that your website is ranking on, you should file a webspam report through Google Webmaster Tools (now referred to as Google Search Console). Please note: Spam does not include reporting sites that rank higher than yours. Falsely reporting a web spam could be considered as Black Hat SEO.

If your website has been attacked through a malicious hack, virus, or malware, you need to remove the malicious code and request for a malware review.

If your website has been targeted by a negative SEO campaign of spammy links, use the Disavow Links Tool in Google Search Console and have them removed.