Black Hat SEO is optimising your website in order to obtain results the quickest way possible, generally straying outside of the Search Engine Guidelines. The main benefit of Black Hat SEO is the results do appear quickly but are unsustainable as the Search Engines are becoming now aware of Black Hat strategies and penalizing websites who execute them. Most webmasters do not hear of websites that are being penalized by Search Engines and are normally frustrated with websites out ranking them using Black Hat SEO however there are examples.
First Example: JC Penny is a large brand who exploited the link building capabilities of other websites, JC Penny at one point ranked for almost all of their keyterms within Google however such antics did not go unnoticed. The Search Engine Google penalized JC Penny for their Black hat tactics. It has taken JC Penny a couple of years to recover from such as drop in traffic.
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Second Example: The large car manufacturer, based in Germany, BMW was given a Google “Death Strike” which entailed them being completely removed from the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS) in 2006. You can read the full story here.
How is Black Hat SEO executed?
Black Hat SEO is normally executed using an automated program or sly on-site optimisation techniques such as cloaking. The programs Black Hat SEO marketing professionals would use are along the lines of SENUKEX, SENUKE, Nichereaper and Scraperbox. These would usually perform mass link building exercises in the form of spamming social bookmarking websites, forums and blog commenting.