Black hat SEO, where SEO means search engine optimization, is the use of methods that search engines do not approve of or that rely on deception. Examples include private blog networks, paid link schemes and cloaking. Google's spam policies list these practices as violations.
History of Black hat SEO
Creator: No single creator. Industry commentators named the category of methods. Year: 1990s.
In the 1990s, webmasters began to optimize websites for search engines. At that time, the first search engines cataloged the early web. Some early search algorithms gave weight to certain HTML attributes. Content providers used that weight to change their rankings. Search engines began to adjust their algorithms in 1997. The goal was to stop those changes.
Industry commentators split search engine optimization (SEO) methods into two groups. White hat SEO follows the guidelines of search engines. Black hat SEO tries to raise rankings. It uses methods that search engines disapprove of, or methods that involve deception. An older black hat method placed hidden text on a page. The text could be colored like the background. It could sit in an invisible layer or off the screen.
In 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a search engine at Stanford University. It used PageRank. PageRank is a score based on the number and strength of inbound links. Link schemes followed soon after. Many sites bought, sold and exchanged links at large scale.
Search engines respond to black hat methods. They lower rankings or remove listings. Penalties can come from automatic algorithms. They can also come from a manual site review. In February 2006, Google removed BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany from its results. The reason was deceptive practices. Both companies apologized. They fixed the pages and returned to the results.
Companies that use black hat methods can have client sites banned from search results. In 2005 the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, that allegedly used high-risk techniques. The report said the company did not disclose those risks to its clients.
Changelog and latest update
In 2007 Google announced a campaign against paid links that pass PageRank. In June 2009 Google said the nofollow attribute would not pass PageRank for sculpting. In 2012 the Penguin update targeted link spam. In 2019 Google began to treat nofollow as a hint.
Google's spam policies list cloaking, doorway abuse, hidden text and link abuse, keyword stuffing, link spam and sneaky redirects as violations. Each entry gives examples. The policies say Google may act on any spam it detects. A site in violation may rank lower or not appear in results. One cloaking example shows a travel page for search engines. Users see a page about discount drugs instead. The policy also says hacked sites often use cloaking. They hide their changes from the site owner.
Latest update: Google Search spam policies, 2026-08-28
The Google spam policies page shows the line "Last updated 2026-08-28 UTC". The page lists cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text and link spam as violations. It says Google detects these practices. It uses automated systems and human review. Users can report suspected spam. They use a search quality user report.
Usage examples
Black hat SEO has no single code. Auditors check a site for the signs that Google's spam policies name, such as hidden text, repeated keywords and different content for search engine crawlers. The three examples below run checks on pages you own or audit. They change no page and send no requests to other sites.
curl -s https://www.example.com/ \
| grep -i -o 'display: *none' \
| wc -lThis command counts the inline style declarations that hide an element with display none. Hidden text is one of the practices that Google's spam policies name. A count above zero means the page needs a manual review, because some menus and forms also use this rule legitimately.
import re, sys, collections
text = open(sys.argv[1]).read().lower()
words = re.findall(r'[a-z]+', text)
counts = collections.Counter(words)
for w, n in counts.most_common(5):
print(w, n)This script reads a saved copy of a page and prints the five most frequent words. Google lists keyword stuffing as a violation. A single word that repeats far more often than the rest of the text is a sign to check the page for unnatural repetition.
URL=https://www.example.com/
curl -s -A "Mozilla/5.0" $URL | md5sum
curl -s -A "Googlebot/2.1" $URL | md5sumThe two requests send a browser user agent and a Googlebot user agent to the same URL. Matching hashes mean the server sent the same page to both. Different hashes do not prove cloaking, because ads, dates and personal settings can also change the page.
References
These sources are outside Websnoogie and were checked on 2026-10-12.
Spam policies for Google web search
Google Search Central
Google's list of practices that violate its web search spam policies. It defines cloaking, doorway abuse, hidden text, keyword stuffing, link spam and sneaky redirects, with examples for each. The page shows its last update date, 28 August 2026, and the user report process.
Search engine optimization
Wikipedia
The encyclopedia article on search engine optimization. It has a section that divides SEO methods into white hat and black hat groups. It covers the 1990s origins of SEO, the PageRank algorithm and the Google penalties of 2006, with citations to the sources.
Spamdexing
Wikipedia
The encyclopedia article on spamdexing, the manipulation of search engine indexes. It lists the methods that search engines try to reduce, including link farms, cloaking and keyword stuffing. It gives the definition used by industry commentators.
Google Search Central
Google Search Central
Google's starting guide for site owners. It covers the basics that Google uses to find, crawl and index pages. It states the quality guidelines that sites must follow, and it links to the spam policies and the search quality rating guidance for further reading. The essentials guide also explains how Google Search uses the robots.txt file and the noindex directive to control which pages appear in its results.
Evolving "nofollow" - new ways to identify the nature of links
Google Search Central Blog
Google post dated September 10, 2019. It introduces rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" and states that the sponsored, ugc and nofollow attributes are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search.
Shortcuts that cost a business its site
The first thing we check on a client site is any hidden text, doorway page or link that a visitor never sees. Black hat SEO means tricks like these. Search engines can drop a site from their results when they find them. We do not use those methods, and we do not build them for any client.
We have worked in web design for more than 20 years. We look at the page code, the title of each page, any hidden pages and the links that point to your site. When we find a trick, we remove it and explain the change in plain words, so you know exactly what your site says to search engines.
The new-website price is $300 once, for up to five pages and a contact page. CMS hosting is $149 a year. An honest site gives search engines plain text to read, and it gives your customers a page they can trust.
If someone offers fast rankings with hidden tricks, ask what they will change on your pages. Dial 402-813-4034 to ask us about your site, or open the $300 website page below.
