SEO is a fierce zero-sum game war.

That’s why some business owners resort to black-hat tactics to topple competitors from the top of the SERPs.

There are certain black-hat SEO techniques you shouldn’t use like hacking (because that’s illegal), but others seem less risky. But even the ones that look like they might be worth it are frankly never a good idea for legitimate businesses–so you should avoid them at all costs.

In this article, we’ll cover six common black-hat SEO tactics and what to do instead:

Buying Links
Keyword stuffing
Blog comment spam
Article spinning
Negative SEO
Rich snippets spam
1. 1.
You can buy links by paying another website to link your site.

Payment for links can be money, goods, or services.

Buying links is bad on many levels:

It is a violation to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Google explains this here.
This could lead to a Google Penalty. Google will penalize your site if they catch you selling or buying links. Although some SEOs are skeptical about the accuracy of Google’s algorithm in identifying paid links, the truth is that they are improving. While they may not be able to identify all of them, it is likely that some links you purchase will have little effect on your rankings and even worse, could hurt them.
Paid links are expensive. $361.44 on average, according to our 2018 case study.
SIDENOTE

Buying links isn’t illegal. Many would argue that it’s not unethical. So although it’s not something we recommend for legitimate businesses, it’s okay to do it if you understand and are willing to take the associated risks.
What should you do instead?
Link outreach.

This is where you create a valuable resource, then reach out to the owner of a website you want a link from and give them a compelling reason to link to it.

It’s not easy. Link outreach can be difficult. It’s only even remotely likely to work when you have a great resource, great prospects, and a great outreach email.

That said, a great way to get started with this approach is to use the icing on the cake technique:

Create a useful resource.
Find pages that your resource will complement.
Pitch your resource to the site owners.
Let’s look at an example…

Say you’ve created a curated list of resume templates. You have a valuable resource. Next, find pages that complement your resource. This might include posts about “how do you write a resume” or guides to creating a template resume.

These pages can be found in Content Explorer which is a searchable database with billions of web pages. Here’s how it works:

Go to Content Explorer
Search for title – “topic” – “What your page is all about”
Toggle One page per domain on
If you search for title “how to write a Resume” -“templates”, you will find over 21,000 posts about writing resumes, but none about templates.

These sites could be reached easily and you could explain your concerns:

You came across their guide to writing a resume.
Notice that they didn’t provide templates to help people get started.
Recently, you compiled a comprehensive list of the top resume templates online.
You might find a resource that is useful to add to their article.
Not everyone will link to you, but some will (as long as your pitch makes sense).

2. Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is the practice of repeating the same keywords (or similar phrases) in your content to manipulate rankings.

Back in the ’90s, this tactic used to work. But not anymore.

Keyword stuffing is bad SEO because:

It makes you sound unnatural. Cramming as many keywords as you can into your content makes your writing sound robotic and ridiculous. It is a quick turnoff for readers.
This can result in a Google penalty. Google says that “filling pages with keywords or numbers […] can harm your site’s ranking,” so don’t bother unless you want your rankings to take a plunge.
What should you do instead?
The antidote to keyword stuffing is comprehensive content.

This can be done in two ways.

Write detailed content about a topic. What will you get? The result will include all expressions and long tail keywords people use when discussing the topic.

The second is to try to cover any subtopics searchers may be interested in and Nomer Siji are likely to find.

Both of these things can help you rank higher because Google doesn’t only judge content based on how many times it mentions the search query. Google also considers whether the page has other relevant content or keywords.

There are many ways to find potential subtopics to cover, such as:

Looking for common subheadings among top-ranking pages for the target keyword.
Brainstorming related topics with your team.
Checking the “people also ask” section on the SERPs.
These methods, however, are labor-intensive.

The easiest and most efficient way is to run a content gap analysis for your page. This shows keywords the top-ranking pages rank for that you don’t, some of which tend to represent subtopics.

Here’s how to do it:

Enter your URL into Site Explorer.
Click Content Gap in the left menu
In the input fields, enter the URLs to 2-3 pages that are similar in rank to your main keyword.
You can search for subtopics by using the search engine.
If we search our guide for guest blogging, then we will see some keywords that are related to “guidelines”.

This advice was not included in our post. So it may be worth adding in for a more comprehensive article that can (hopefully) beat our competitors.

3. Blog comment spam
Blog comment spam refers to the practice of posting irrelevant comments on blog posts in order to get a link back from your site.

This is annoying for blogs that are receiving the comments, but it’s bad for SEO. Blog comment links are almost always notfollowed. That means the links are extremely unlikely to help you rank.