Now that Google's algorithms include machine learning and hundreds of ranking factors, it's difficult to believe that people could ever trick the search engine into displaying their results with underhanded techniques. However, black-hat SEO - or SEO that defies Google's guidelines and sneaks through to the top rankings - has been around for a long time and still happens. Without reading Google's Webmaster Guidelines, you might not even know you're doing it.

Google is passionate about supplying the best results for users, and sneaky SEO tactics bypass the regular quality metrics and push better, qualified pages out of sight on the SERPs. As Google has grown and honed its skills, it's applied penalties to black hat SEO practices. Google penalties could kick you off the SERPs completely or plummet your page to the bottom.

You can see if your site has any penalties in the Google Search Console message center or Manual Actions report. If you stick with SEO habits that Google frowns upon, your rankings won't improve. Let's go over the solutions and optimization activities you can perform to meet Google's standards and skyrocket your SEO rankings on Google.