Black Hat SEO.

The terms black hat and white hat come from old westerns, in which the villains wore black hats and the heroes white ones. In search engine optimisation, black hat SEO describes techniques aimed at manipulating how search engines assess pages instead of actually making the content better. Google summarises these techniques in its spam policies.

Well-known methods include: keyword stuffing (unnatural accumulation of search terms), hidden text in the background colour, cloaking (search engines see different content from visitors), doorway pages (many almost identical pages for different places or terms, all leading to the same destination), bought links or link networks, automatically generated mass texts without added value, copying other people's content and exploiting other sites' strong domains for your own content.

Google responds in two ways. Automated systems such as SpamBrain recognise many patterns and downgrade pages or links. In addition, staff impose manual actions, which are shown in Search Console and can remove parts of a website or the whole website from the results. Recovering from this often takes months and requires all violations to be eliminated.

For Swiss SMEs, black hat SEO is a bad deal. At best the methods bring short-term gains, but they put at risk the most important source of visitors for many businesses. They also damage customer trust, for example when invented reviews or obvious text deserts are noticed. On top of that, AI systems also select their sources by trustworthiness; manipulated content is not a good basis there.