Blackhat SEO involves unethical techniques to drive traffic to a website quickly and inexpensively, but it is only effective in the short term as search engines work to detect and prevent spammy tactics like link farms, social bookmarking abuse, and account buying. While blackhat SEO may be scalable and automated, it can damage a site's reputation, lead to penalties from search engines, and provide an annoying experience for users.

1. Blackhat SEO
Exploiting Social Media for Traffic
Maxim Ogienko
BUS 456

2. What is it?

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of
increasing a website’s popularity in search engines.
Black-hat SEO is a set of techniques for unethically,
but not necessarily illegally, driving traffic to a site.

4. Why use it?

5. Time-Consuming
Expensive
Ineffective
“Search Engine Optimization = Slow ”
Non-Scaleable
Difficult
Boring

6. Cheap
Scaleable
Automated
Targeted
Quick

7. Why not use it?

8. Annoying
Unethical
Short-Living
Suspicious

9. How does it work?

10. Trick search engines
Get links (from big, reputable sites)
Cover page in keywords
Spam social media sites

11. Who uses it?

12. Affiliate marketers
Spammers
Fraudsters
Big companies

13. How to use it?

14. Link Farms
Create thousands of pages containing
meaningless links,all leading to one place

15. Social Bookmarking
Use fake accounts at social bookmarking
sites to submit the target site multi ple times.

16. Account Buying
Purchasing hacked accounts at social
media sites to broadcast the target site’s
message and post links.
PVA Accounts
Many sites now require a valid phone
number to register. A phone-verified
account (PVA) has a valid phone number
on file. These are much harder to fake.

17. Who is affected?

19. How to fight it?

20. Improving search engines
Moderation
Making links NOFOLLOW
CAPTCHAs
Crowdsourcing cleanup