Recently, one of our copywriters posted a guide on the differences between white hat SEO and black hat SEO. I thought I’d leverage that recency to key in on some specific black hat SEO techniques (some of which are still unfortunately encountered periodically) that will almost definitely hurt your organic presence.
So, with no further ado, here they are.
Buying Cheap Links
It is a well-established fact that backlinks to your website can potentially increase domain authority and result in increases in referral traffic. It is at the very least forgone that backlink profile is a ranking signal that Google uses to assign rankings in the search engine results pages.
Beyond that, there is a large gray area that SEO experts have been going back and forth over since time immemorial.
The thing is, no two links are equal. The contextual quality of the linking domain, its domain authority, its spam score, and the nature of the link, along with the anchor text, all of these things are soft signals that influence the quality of the link itself. Any expert working for an eCommerce SEO company can tell you that.
That is to say, links, for the sake of links, are not necessarily a good thing. A backlink strategy can be a great element of your SEO strategy, or it can tank your website.
There are two ways to harm your SEO with backlinks. One is buying links and getting caught doing it. Google will definitely penalize your website if this occurs.
The other is soliciting links from low-quality or spammy websites. Far from helping your website (or having no effect), low-quality backlinks can actually incur a penalty, especially if your website has more than a few of them.
If your website has good quality copy, you will earn backlinks organically. I know this from firsthand experience. The truth is that is the best backlink strategy. Don’t buy them; that’s black hat SEO and more than likely to harm your website.
Publishing AI Generated Copy
I have written about this at numerous points before and can point to several examples of AI-generated copy not just being ineffective for SEO, but for delivering patently, sometimes hilariously (and sometimes dangerously) false information to straightforward questions that don’t even need an AI engine to answer them.
And yet, here we are. It’s 2026 and people are still trying to get rich quick by using AI-generated copy to get to the tops of the search results pages. I’ll be honest, sometimes it even works, but it never works for long, and the writing is on the wall. AI slop has reduced the quality of everything digital in our lives, to the point that Wikipedia has officially banned AI-generated copy.
Let’s also just talk about some basic facts. AI gets things wrong and it flagrantly and wantonly makes things up. What it gets right it only does so because it plagiarizes the work and experience of others, and what’s more offensive is that even what it does get right is often surface-level and self-evident.
Let alone my personal gripes with AI, it cannot produce an experiential component. Because it is not “real” in the conventional sense, all AI can do is reiterate what others have said before it. It cannot lean on its own experience in a specific field to produce anything useful because all it is is a glorified copy-and-paste machine.
But I will leave off beating this dead horse. You have been warned and you are being warned again. Do not use AI-generated copy to improve the rankings of your website. If it works at all, it will only be for a short time and you will eventually pay the price with backsliding rankings, fewer site visits, and lower time on page.
(Just in case you wanted a more long-winded vilification of generative AI, see some of my previous articles, 7 Reasons Not to Use AI in SEO and AI and SEO: What Not to Do.)
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing has been a black hat SEO technique since before I even got involved in this, and I’ve been doing this for a while. Nonetheless, the shadow of keyword stuffing looms over us all from time to time, experienced copywriters included.
To keep things as basic as possible, keyword stuffing occurs when one of two things happens: either you force the keyword into a short space with unnatural frequency, or else you force the keyword into a phrase where it sounds inorganic or unnatural.
Both are bad for SEO as well as for the user experience.
Have you ever been reading an article and either thought “this makes no sense and isn’t really answering the question that led me here” or “there are a few phrases that keep showing up here with suspicious frequency”?
If you have, or you’ve thought some other shade of the same basic thing, then you’ve experienced keyword stuffing in the wild.
The thing is, search engines used to see all of those instances of a keyword or phrase reiterated with unnatural density and think “this this is an authority on that keyword, might as well give it some better rankings!” Today that no longer happens.
And as search engine crawlers get smarter (and presumably leverage conversational AI models) they’re only going to get better at sniffing out bad copy.
Don’t stuff keywords; your pages will tank.
Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
A private blog network, sometimes referred to as a PBN, is basically a privately owned network of domains used for farming links.
Here’s the thing: a private blog network might put out some really good content and be composed of high-domain authority websites. On that aspect alone, it checks out.
But what Google doesn’t like is that it is gaming the system, and therein lies the problem. So refer to my previous warning about earning links organically. That’s the way to do it.
Hidden Text Tricks
There used to be all sorts of ways that digital marketing and SEO “experts” would trick search engines into thinking a page was more of an authority than it was.
Hiding text in the margins and publishing text on a same-color background are just two of these tricks. I won’t give voice to more lest any unscrupulous readers gain any ideas from my caveats.
Basically, it works like this: you hide text somewhere on your page, or in the margin, or in a header or footer or something like that, and Google crawls that text and takes your page for an authority.
The problem with this is the same as the problem with PBNs; it’s gaming the system. Also it tends to ruin the user experience and on top of that, the hidden text tends to be keyword-stuffed garbage.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a practice whereby different copy is served to actual human visitors and search engines. Furthermore, a user can’t see when copy is cloaked without inspecting the page element.
There are multiple types of cloaking, and one of them is simply hidden text that was explained in the last section. There are other cloaking techniques, such as IP cloaking, in which owners identify crawlers by IP and display different information, and user-agent cloaking, in which the browser type or OS is used to distinguish between real users and search engine crawlers so that different copy can be displayed to each.
In any event, cloaking typically requires some degree of technical knowledge, so whereas an average user can accidentally keyword stuff, a plain old web admin can’t accidentally engage in cloaking without some special skills.
Either way, cloaking will hurt your website in the long run. Don’t do it.
The Risks of Engaging in Black Hat SEO
I wish I could say that if you engage in black hat SEO, the negative effects will be ultimately limited to a gradual decline in average position, or to one page’s dropoff. But that truth is much worse. If your website gets a manual penalty, the entire domain could be de-indexed. Rankings and traffic will literally vanish overnight and it could take years to regain the lost ground.
I’ve kept it brief. That should be sufficient caution.
Don the White Hat and Succeed
Don’t take my word for it. Ask your eCommerce SEO company (or call us). You’ll see what I’ve published is true.
Regardless, if you’ve had a bad experience with an eCommerce SEO company in the past that engaged in black hat techniques, don’t let that sour you to the whole channel. SEO still produces the best ROI and is the most effective of all organic digital marketing strategies when properly and responsibly implemented.
Give us a call to learn more. We’ll answer your questions for you and if you like outline a strategy to get you better rankings.