What is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO is a type of unscrupulous search engine optimization tactic used to raise a website's search engine results page (SERP) ranking illegitimately or lower the ranking of a competitor's site. 

Some examples of black hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, invisible text, doorway pages, adding unrelated keywords to the page content or page swapping (changing the webpage entirely after it has been ranked by search engines).

Search engine providers, such as Google, consider optimization tactics that are deceptive or don't conform to their guidelines to be black hat methods. Such tactics may be detected by an algorithm and result in an automatically lowered ranking. A manual site review that detects deceptive practices can result in the website's removal from the search engine's index. 

Black hat SEO is more frequently used by those who are looking for a quick financial return on their Web site, rather than a long-term investment on their Web site. Black hat SEO can possibly result in your Web site being banned from a search engine, however since the focus is usually on quick high return business models, most experts who use Black Hat SEO tactics consider being banned from search engines a somewhat irrelevant risk.