Imagine you’re walking down a busy street in Brooklyn, New York, on a busy and rainy morning. As you walk to your social media marketing job, you bump into someone tall who is wearing an oversized black hat, paired with a long trench coat. They don’t know your background, but they can clearly see you mean business by the way you’re dressed. The suspicious person claims to be an expert in this so-called ‘black hat marketing’ and tells you they can help you receive quick results, give you a competitive advantage over competing businesses, and mitigate any weaknesses present in the social media platforms you use. Little do they know, you’re a social media marketing wizard who has their SMS certificate from NISM. You know exactly what black hat marketing is and why it should be avoided! 

Moving on from our above story, are you aware of what black hat marketing is? According to Dr. Amy Jauman’s Comprehensive Field Guide for Social Media Strategists, black hat marketing is a practice or technique that is illegally or unethically used in digital marketing campaigns. Practitioners are typically the culprits when it comes to this terrible practice. The reasoning? They desire quick results for their business. However, these practices are quickly detected, and the results gained by black hat marketing are undone by platform owners and search engines. 

Common Black Hat Marketing Tactics

Now that we have defined black hat marketing, what exactly are the specific tactics used in it? To give you a better idea of these practices, Michael Steele from Shopify reports on his blog the following 9 common black hat SEO tactics: 

 1. Hidden Text: Think of hiding your keywords with white text on a webpage that are undetectable to the human eye but are detectable by what are known as search engine crawlers.

 2. Keyword Stuffing: This tactic involves erratically filling, or stuffing, the content and meta tags on a website, making it counterproductive for the user. 

 3. Link Farms: Networks of interlinked websites mimic authority through the quantity and quality of backlinks. As a result, the linking sites achieve a higher ranking, regardless of whether the content relevant to the readers. 

 4. Private Blog Networks: These networks create several websites that direct back to a single site. Essentially, inbound links can boost the receiving website’s position on SERPs (search engine results page).  

 5. Blog Comment Spam: Blog comment spam involves leaving comments on external blogs that include links directing back to your website. 

 6. Copying Competitor Content: Replicating content from high-ranking competitor websites without their permission. 

 7. Rich Snippet Abuse: Google’s non-plain-text results, or rich snippets, can include public figures, shopping results, recipes, reviews, etc. Because rich snippets can help increase traffic to websites, they are sometimes used to mislead users. For example, think of fake reviews.  

 8. Negative SEO: Intentionally harming competitors’ websites and making them look like they’re using black hat practices. Examples include pretending to be your competitor and creating blog comment spam or purchasing links from link farms. 

 9. Hacking or Supporting Hacked Websites: This includes supporting website hackers, in which one purchases or creates links coming from hacked websites and then linking them back to their own. 

Black hat marketing tactics are not only limited to SEO, but they’re also exhibited on social media websites. In fact, four common black hat social media practices include: 

 1. Buying Social Shares and Fans or Followers: By intentionally purchasing likes, followers, and shares from websites such as Fiverr, this sly black hat marketing tactic can wrongly give authority to inferior business pages through these fake engagements. 

 2. Linking From Low-Quality Social Sites: Companies using this deceptive black hat marketing practice will link low-quality websites to their competitors’ website to lower their search engine ranking. 

 3. Fake Reviews: All too often, competing companies leave bad reviews for their rivals, which can sometimes result in decreased click-through rates (CTR) due to low numeric or star ratings that appear next to their names on search engines. 

 4. Creating and Optimizing Fake Accounts: Competitors will create fake social media profiles, which rank well in search engines. By doing so, they try to decrease the ranking of their competitors’ genuine social media profiles, sabotage social media efforts, and tarnish the brand’s image.  

The two above lists provide some of the capabilities black hat SEO and black hat social media marketing have. Recognizing these deviant practices is the first step you can take to avoid them down the road.  

Consequences of Black Hat Marketing

Since black hat marketing practices can offer short-term competitive advantage when it comes to competing with other companies, the long-term consequences of this dark practice can be detrimental to your company. According to LeadsView’s LinkedIn article, black hat SEO practices come with many risks. Some include: 

• Punishments and Exclusion from Search Results: It is highly possible to receive a penalty from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing if black hat SEO is tampered with by your company. In fact, the article What are the risks associated with using black hat SEO? informs us that if your company is to receive a penalty from Google for using black hat SEO, the ranking of your website will drop, and worst case scenario, Google will permanently ban you. 
• Degradation of Brand Image: Partaking in black hat SEO also increases your company’s risk of hurting your brand’s reputation and losing credibility with your audience. 
• Unpredictability and Unsustainability: Trying to stick to your long-term digital marketing strategy can be quite difficult with black hat SEO practices since search engines are continuously enhancing their algorithms to ward off black hat practices. Even if your company is to prevail with such a tactic, it is often the case that it will be short-lived, which proves to be an unsustainable marketing practice. 
• Unpleasant User Experience: Unfavorable user experiences are created through black hat marketing since tactics like cloaking, unrelated backlinks, and keyword stuffing may result in upset users who seek high-quality content on a company’s website. 
• Ethical Concerns: Black hat SEO practices can burn bridges with customers, clients, and industry peers since your company is intentionally altering search rankings. 

Finally, black hat tactics can lead to unfavorable legal implications, like lawsuits and fines. 

The Final Word

Whether you choose to engage or not engage in black hat marketing is totally up to you. Just be warned that doing so can lead to catastrophic consequences that are incredibly tough to, if not impossible, to overcome for you and your company. Lastly, although our SMS Code of Ethics doesn’t explicitly prohibit practicing black hat tactics, those who are SMS certified through NISM are advised to avoid any unethical practices altogether.

 

Author: Sam Cuellar

Digital Marketing graduate from DePaul University, Social Media Strategist Intern at the National Institute for Social Media, and professional bass player with a passion for both social media marketing and music.