it’s not illegal in any way shape or form. You will not go to jail for engaging in any black
hat SEO technique and in most cases, you can’t be sued for it either (there are
exceptions which we’ll get to shortly). That said, black hat SEO is the sort of thing you
want to stay away from because it could cause you lots of problems. Here’s why:
Google publishes guidelines for the kind of SEO that they’ll approve of. There is also an
unwritten rule that most SEO professionals follow which states that “we’ll follow certain
basic rules of decency when we engage in SEO”. Black hat SEO violates these rules by
engaging in techniques which are generally considered sneaky and underhanded.
Some obvious examples of black hat SEO include keyword stuffing.
(where you send out thousands of worthless comments to blogs in the hope of getting
links from them which will provide you with those important backlinks).
Some of the less common methods of black hat SEO include things like Google Bowling
(this is where you send out spam links for another website which is your competitor in
the hopes of getting them beaten down in the rankings) and meta tag stuffing (where
you put in keywords in your meta tags which have no relationship to what you are
actually writing about – see above in history of SEO.
In most cases, these things are not illegal although if you deliberately damage the
reputation of your competitors and they prove it, you can be sued for slander), however
Google tends to frown on such things and will generally de-list your website or at the
very least lower your rankings, which ultimately means that you’ll lose out.
However, black hat SEO does have a place in the world of SEO. First of all, it’s useful
for teaching us techniques which are considered gray hat. For example, while mass
spamming is considered to be black hat, many SEO experts still try to get lots of links
out there, but with more targeted material which actually makes sense.
Black hat SEO can also be helpful at times, especially when you are trying to build a
site which is temporary and which will make money for a short while. A good example of
this is the JC Penney debacle. In this case, JC Penney was accused of using spam to
generate additional backlinks which helped them to rank higher in the SERPs for
popular search terms, thus cornering the market for a number of products, especially
during the busy Christmas season.
They were eventually caught and Google lowered their rankings for a number of search
terms, however they did reap millions of dollars in extra sales in the interim.
Another term you may often hear is the term Page Rank or PR and
no, PR doesn’t stand for press release or public relations when you’re talking about
SEO, unless the article you are reading is specifically about one of those things.
Rank is a system designed by Google to let you know how popular a given website is.
It’s an amalgam of a whole host of different factors, including number of backlinks, how
long the site has been around, how often it gets updates and more. PR ranges from 0 to
10 with 10 being the highest.
Most pages on the Internet have a PR of 0 or 1. These kinds of links tend to be easier to
get, however they are also worth less than links on better known websites. There is no
logarithmic scale which can tell you exactly what one link is worth on any given site
because a great many different factors go into deciding how much a link is worth as far
as Google is concerned (for example, if it's a blog comment link, that's worth less than a
link within the text of an article even if both of them are “do follow” links). However, a
page with higher PR is going to offer you significantly more value from a link than a
page with lower ranking.
To understand this, think of it as if the local anchor from Tulas, Oklahoma gave your
website an endorsement during her newscast. That's definitely useful and definitely
worth something. However, if you were to get Christiane Amanpour on This Week, a
nationally broadcast news show to give you a recommendation, then it would be worth
much more. Worth still more would be someone with major star power, for example if
Oprah were to give you a mention.