Can you help me understand the basic SEO practices of Black-Hat optimization to be avoided at all cost?

Yes, I can give you a brief summary that will cover the basic SEO practices of Black-Hat Search Engine Optimization for you to keep away with your own website or blog at all cost. Ultimately – for you to always feel yourself on the safe side, without putting your hard-earned ranking progress under a really severe risk of earning yourself a severe ranking penalty due to the illegitimate usage of potentially violential approaches or explicitly manipulative techniques of optimization. It’s far better to stay on the safe side using only basic SEO practices, which are fully accepted and legalized by Google search engine itself, right? So, let’s see what must always be avoided to that point.

Basic SEO Practices to Be Avoided at All Cost

Black-Hat Search Engine Optimization

So, let's face it – most of the following basic Black-Hat SEO practices are simply not working anymore. Besides, applying for them can even hurt your actual ranking progress, commonly leading every website or blog to the ranking demotion, instead of delivering any measurable gains. That being said, make sure to keep yourself away at least from the following illegitimate basic SEO practices:

• Using Link Farm/Purchasing Paid Links – this is when a number of low-quality websites or blogs decide to get linked to each other, taking no care about such organic SEO patterns like web source content quality, relevance, user intent beyond the search, etc. Doing so, you might as well be caught and penalized – just because your own link profile appears to be built "artificially" or at least in a definitely "tricky" or "manipulative" manner.
• Stealing Content/Automatic Content Spinning – stands for using a duplicate content, as well as partially "scrapped" or even "re-written" text writings for the sake of ranking promotion. Automatic article spinning is nearly much the same. Given that you're careless enough to generate masses of the similar content, with the similar meaning, and optimized for a nearly similar set of the main target keywords – you will have a really high chance of being penalized, as this approach is far from delivering any actual added value to the user, right?
• Hidden Text – this really tricky tactic was widely used in those good old times when Google's search ranking algorithm hadn't been that sophisticated. But now you should be cautious – never use hidden text to mention your keywords more frequently, just by way of making them match the background of the website or blog. Yes, in the distant past you could use hidden text among the other fully legitimate basic SEO practices – as it hadn't been considered as a violational one. But now things have changed, so make sure you are not going to "trick" and "manipulate" with Google, or even have a try to that point.

Bottom Line

For conclusion, I’d like to declare it once again – you’d far better keep yourself away from using any Black-Hat or Grey-Hat approaches to the search engine optimization. Just because the lion’s share of such schemes are simply not working anymore – and now can even result in ranking demotion to sometimes irreversible manual ranking penalty imposed by Google. So, I recommend focusing your effort only on the basic SEO practices that are generally recognized and are coming in a full compliance with Google’s Major SEO Guidelines for Webmasters. That’s it.