Exploring Black Hat SEO: Risks and Consequences It needs little introduction in competitive digital marketing that SEO is a vital technique for improving the website ranking on search engine result pages. Even though many Website owners and marketers engage in ethical practices some use ‘black hat’ strategies to gain a deeper market penetration. This paper aims at explaining the black hat SEO, its approaches and the negative impacts of their application. What is Black Hat SEO? A Black hat SEO refers to a set of trends specifically aimed at achieving good rankings through improper ways. Some of these strategies break the rules set by most of the search engine providers and are specifically intended to deceive both, the users as well as the engines. While it is true that black hatting can make your web site rank high in a short while you stand to lose your site and suffer penalties. Common Black Hat Techniques Keyword Stuffing: In this technique, specific keywords are used on content ma