Black hat SEO: beware of forbidden techniques on Google

Looking for shortcuts and quicker solutions to achieve a goal, even daringly, is perhaps a natural human trait, and the field of SEO is no exception. Alongside regular and official practices, i.e., those that comply with the limits marked by the Google Guidelines, a great many techniques with blurred lines or openly in violation of the rules have developed, which are called black hat SEO.

This expression is used to group together a number of highly manipulative techniques and tactics that exploit certain features of search engine algorithms to try to force a site’s ranking, pushing it up in Google’s SERPs. Over time, the search engine has become good at identifying and penalizing such black-hatted techniques and deploys a number of tools to beat this scourge, and when it discovers these manipulative attempts it penalizes the site and its pages, but that still does not stop people from trying them while exposing themselves to the risk of an algorithmic or manual penalty.

Why is it called black hat SEO?

From a grammatical point of view, the expression black hat SEO refers back to the symbolism used in American Western cinema between the 1920s and 1940s in black and white: as stated in Wikipedia, black hat was the symbol of the bad guys, distinguished in this way from the good guys who instead wore a white hat (white hat). And so, the Black Hat SEO takes