30 Sec Answer: The four factors of black hat SEO are keyword stuffing, link schemes, cloaking, and hidden text.

Introduction

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website's ranking on search engines like Google and Bing. While white hat SEO techniques focus on optimizing a website to provide users with valuable information and content, black hat SEO techniques aim to manipulate search engine algorithms to improve rankings without providing value to the user. Here are some of the common black hat SEO techniques used by unethical webmasters.

Keyword Stuffing

One of the most common black hat SEO techniques is keyword stuffing. This involves loading webpages with keywords in an effort to boost page rankings in SERPs. The practice goes against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines which specifically states that “keyword stuffing can result in penalties or even removal from their index”.

Link Schemes

Link schemes involve creating artificial links between websites to manipulate page rankings. It includes tactics such as buying and selling links, reciprocal linking, article spinning, and blog comment spamming. Link schemes have been known to lead to penalty action from Google so they should be avoided at all costs.

Cloaking

Cloaking refers to displaying different content to search engine spiders than what human visitors see on a website. For example, a website may display images when visited by humans but hide them from spiders in order to get higher rankings for the site’s targeted keywords. Cloaking is considered one of the more serious offenses according to Google’s webmaster guidelines and can lead to a manual penalty or de-indexing of the site.

Hidden Text

Hidden text involves hiding keywords within a website’s HTML code in an attempt to increase page rankings for those particular words. This technique has also become obsolete due to improvements in search engine algorithms and can result in serious penalties if discovered by search engines like Google.

Conclusion

Black hat SEO techniques should be avoided at all costs as they go against best practices established by major search engines like Google and Bing. While these methods might give your website a temporary boost in rankings, they could also lead to severe penalties or removal from search engine indexes altogether.