What is the meaning of black hat SEO and precautions to prevent it?

Ans-1. Black Hat SEO means violating Webmaster Guidelines - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en. In other words, it means manipulating search engine's ranking signals to increase the SERPs of a website. For example, building backlinks, low quality content, keyword stuffing etc.

Ans-2. The word has come from Black Hat Hackers.

Ans-3. The most common offsite black hat seo technique is unnatural link building. So, if someone is doing this with your site, you can simply disavow those low quality backlinks from Google webmaster tools.

Black hat SEO technique refers to the aggressive usage of SEO techniques to get more traffic. These techniques focus more on the search engines rather than human audience.
Common Black hat techniques include
Keyword stuffing
Excessive back links.
Using unrelated keywords with just one aim of driving traffic.
Page swapping (changing page content once the page is ranked by search engine).
Using tiny text or illegible text for links.
Doorway pages ( Pages filled with keywords which then use a java script to redirect visitors to some other unrelated page).

These are a few techniques used by Black hat SEO "experts".

If you ever happened to have searched for result of a particular entrance exam, or cutoffs or something like that some 4 or 5 years ago, you must have surely come across websites that would take you by surprise and would compel you to ensure you never visited the thing again. Reason? You did not get the desires result and were rather befooled by stupid links that would keep you directing to different webpages on the same website and in a matter of 5 to 10 minutes you had learned you couldn't find anything material on that website.

That was just an example of a Black-Hat SEO technique.

Black-Hat is a term used to describe SEO practices which intend only to manipulate search engines to index the intended webpage and show them higher in the search results. Usually, such practices are against the guidelines that search engines profess. But websites, admins of which seek quick returns on their website would use such undesired techniques. Usually webmasters who practice Black Hat SEO techniques are not interested in putting up any material of relevance or use and abstain from putting in the huge effort it takes to build a website/blog that actually makes a difference.

Some famous examples of black-hat SEO techniques are keyword stuffing, addition of invisible text and addition of keywords to the page that are entirely irrelevant to its page.

Regarding why it's called black hat: The words black-hat and white-hat have relationship to the Western movies wherein the bad guys would wear a black hat and the good guys would put on white hats. So, that's where the terminology gets its name from.

I don't exactly understand what you meant when you asked how to prevent black hat SEO techniques in the title of the question but if you meant how to avoid it, then some of the practices would include:

• Avoid adding words that are irrelevant to the page, or words that have exactly nothing to do with the page only because you want more traffic on the page


• An old practice which goes by the name keyword-stuffing is highly recommended to be avoided because search engines have learned to detect keyword-stuffing and if it happens, rankings are sure to fall. Do not repeat keywords in your articles just because you want to increase the frequency and density of the keyword. It won't lead you anywhere today.


• Duplicate content must be avoided