Black Hat SEO is still going on, it works incredibly well, and it makes a lot of people make money. The downside is that it goes against all ethical guidelines, damages companies' reputations, leads to manual sanctions, and ultimately the blacklisting of thousands of websites. Stay away from the edge of the cliff unless you want to fall into the de-indexed abyss. Black Hat SEO techniques and practices can damage not only your site traffic, but also the credibility of your business.
Don't do it, really, don't. While Black Hat SEO isn't illegal, it violates the webmaster guidelines set by search engines. In other words, it continues to break the rules. This means that if you engage in black hat SEO, you must be willing to take a nasty penalty as punishment.
Receiving a penalty from search engines will cause your website to appear in search results, or worse, it could be removed altogether. This means that your website will gain less traffic and, ultimately, fewer customers. If there's an SEO tactic that you find difficult to categorize as black or white hat SEO, then it's probably a gray hat technique. In case your website is the target of a negative SEO campaign for spam links, use the Disavow Links tool in Google Webmaster Tools after you have tried to contact the webmasters who are pointing these links to your website to have them removed.
Duplicate content is a black hat SEO technique that involves copying and pasting large blocks of content on the same website or across multiple domains. White hat SEO is about creating quality content and a better overall user experience for the people who visit your site. But that party didn't last long and now search engines exclude these sites from their search results. Invisible text is a black hat SEO technique that hides keywords from the visitor, but is still visible to the search engine for crawling and indexing.
Instead, you should use white-hat SEO tactics, such as creating incredible content, graphics, data, interviews, or any other content that allows you to acquire backlinks naturally over time. Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices that are used to increase the ranking of a site or page in search engines through means that violate search engine terms of service. Creating scholarship links is a black hat SEO strategy that involves creating a page on your website that promotes a fake scholarship. You won't find gray hat SEO in the middle of a Robin Thicke song, but you'll find it somewhere in the middle of black and white hat SEO.
When a web user searches for that term, Google crawls their index, discovers that your website is relevant to the search query, and returns a link to it among a list of others. If you want to use a long-term search engine optimization strategy, then you should focus on white hat SEO methods. Black hat SEO is a set of SEO techniques used to increase a site's ranking on search engine results pages that violate search engine guidelines. Search engines prefer single content, so deliberately duplicated content across different domains is perceived as one of the worst black hat techniques.