Black Hat

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Black hat is often used to refer to a villain.  It is not always used simply to describe the color of headwear.

Why do black hats get such a bad deal?

Black Cowboy HatsIn United States films of the Western genre between the 1920s and the 1940s, white hats were often worn by heroes and black hats by villains to symbolize the contrast in good versus evil.  The 1903 short film The Great Train Robbery was the first to apply this convention.

Black hat is now often used in reference to a bad person, especially a villain or criminal in a movie, novel, play or in real life.

In western movies the color of the hat was typically relevant to whether or not the cowboy was on the side of good or evil.  The cowboy hat often matters when watching cowboy shows on television or on the big screen.

Black Hat = Bad

White Hat = Good

Even many cartoon villains wear black hats.  For example, Snidely.  Snidely Whiplash is the archenemy of Dudley Do-Right in the Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties segments of the animated television series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

Black Hat Cartoon Villain Snidely

The wicked witch had is also black.

Black Wicked Witch Hat

The Wicked Witch of the West is a fictional character created by L. Frank Baum as the most significant antagonist in his classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Wicked Witch of the West Black Hat

Regarding black headwear, it is not only gangster cowboys, wicked witches, or nasty cartoon characters that wear black headwear.  Darth Vader obviously wore a black helmet.  Vader appears in the original film trilogy as a pivotal antagonist whose actions drive the plot, while his past as Anakin Skywalker and the story of his corruption are central to the narrative of the prequel trilogy.

Black Helmet Headwear

This convention of black hats representing the darker side of humanity gave rise to the terms black hat and white hat to refer to malicious and ethical hackers respectively.

Black hat symbolismA symbol is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship.  Often the black hat symbolizes a negative connotation.

black-hat SEO is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes.  In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, black hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines guidelines.  It often involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed, in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.  It could be considered to be a part of search engine optimization.  When the term is used it typically references the fact that techniques are being used to unfairly manipulate search results.  Some of these techniques may include, keyword stuffing, hidden or invisible text, doorway pages, scraper sites, article spinning, machine translation, link spam, cloaking, link farms, etc.  Black hat SEO is more frequently used by those who are looking for a quick financial return on their Web site, rather than a long-term investment on their Web site. Black hat SEO can possibly result in your Web site being banned from a search engine, however

A black hat hacker (or black-hat hacker) is a hacker who "violates computer security for little reason beyond maliciousness or for personal gain".  Black hat hackers break into secure networks to destroy, modify, or steal data, or to make the networks unusable for authorized network users.

Their are many different types of black hats

Black Hats

Black is the absence of color, or more specifically the complete absorption of light.

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You may also want to learn about white hats.