How to check if a site is doing blackhat SEO?

[esiow2013]

Thanks in advance!

[gazzerman1]

Your question is a bit to open ended, what do you want to achieve by knowing this information.

Does a site rank better than you?
Are they doing negative seo to other people?
Do they steal content from people?Are they building links as dofollow from places they should not?

Too many questions to ask before answering such a vague answer.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I can't agree more with Gary, we probably need some more information to know what kind of black hat you're possibily dealing with. One of the first things I tend to look at trying to find out if the site is using some ways of black hat tactics are:

• Backlink profile, if the quality of links is low or certain percentages between follow/ nofollow links are different then it could be a sign.
• Look at the site with Google as a user agent and see if the site is showing different information then to a real user.
• Just do a select all on the site to see if they hide any content (yup, still happens).

[Kingof5]

An even easier way is to check their rankings - if they're top 3 for big money terms in their niche, they're probably using some blackhat tactics. Even the whitest of whitehats are still using some blackhat tactics in the background, despite people not wanting to admit it.

[MarieHaynes]

Why does it matter?

[JaneCopland]

It really depends on what you define as blackhat. On-page trickery (cloaking, redirects for search engines bots, etc.) can be discovered by browsing as a search bot, digging into code, viewing caches, etc. Danny Sullivan and Rand uncovered a large amount of cloaked (and stolen) content on stage at SMX Sydney a few years ago. It was quite entertaining at the time

Some people are basic enough to use tactics like hidden, white-on-white text, as Martijn says. I'm yet to see that tactic actually working post-2004 though

If it's links they're using, the easiest way is to use a tool like Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs or similar to check the links out. Sneaky people can block the OSE / Ahrefs / MajesticSEO bots from crawling the sources of their backhat links if they have access to the linking sites. You can block the bots either in robots.txt or by rejecting the visits to stop the bots from noting that the links exist. That way, the backlink analysis tools will never see that blackhatsite.com links to rankingsite.com, and so forth. It takes a big network that the spammer controls to block link research tools' bots' access to every link you build, however, so this isn't too common.

Whether all big brands / well ranked sites are using blackhat tactics pretty much depends on your definition of blackhat, but it's certainly true that it is very hard if not impossible to rank top 3 for competitive terms (car insurance, poker, credit cards) without parting with money that results in links being built. This doesn't mean that they're all buying links, but they're definitely investing in marketing that results in links, and the whitest of the whitehats will say that this is technically not organic, natural link development. It is, however, what we do - marketing.