The term 'black hat' is especially rife among hackers, but it originated from a completely different sector. In classic Western movies, the villain usually wears a black hat during a duel, whereas the hero wears a white hat. 'Black hat' can be described with many different terms and they all conjure up images of shady and illegal activities. For some, it’s dirty methods used to generate links, and for others it’s obvious spam practices. In any case, the goal with black hat SEO is to try to bypass official quality guidelines set by search engines in order to gain an advantage over your competitors.
If you start a website from scratch, you’ll know it’s a lengthy process to get to the top position with Google, Bing, and other search engines. You need to build up a reputation and earn the trust of users. The corresponding signals that Google uses to evaluate pages must be generated. A major factor is domain trust, which is the credibility and trustworthiness that Google attributes to a website. You can find more on this topic in our article on ranking factors. The idea behind black hat SEO is simply to feign reputation and trust so the site appears more relevant, popular, and stronger than it actually is.
If black hat SEO results in violations to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google doesn’t take it lightly: the site operator will be punished and the site could even be banned from the Google Index.