Black Hat SEO Explained
When it comes to SEO practices, you want to be as ethical as possible. You also want to rank as high as you can. Sometimes referred to as “search engine spamming”, black hat SEO techniques attempt to exploit the search engine rankings with keyword stuffing, illegal link building, and spam.
Although there is no concrete definition for “black hat SEO”, it is generally understood to be anything that would be considered an unethical practice of SEO. Funny thing is, ethics can be subjective, making black hat subjective. This results in the thought that there are varying shades of “hats” that exist. It is important to always use ethical practices.
Search engines differ in their standards for what are acceptable SEO practices. Some base it on how your practices impact others, with an anything goes clearance on your own site. Others insist that your content be beneficial to the viewer, both on and off site. Others suggest that anything causing your SERP ranking to be “unnaturally” high a no no.
Generally used as a short run solution, common “black hat techniques” include, keyword stuffing, invisible texting, link farms and improper use of doorway pages. They’re considered to be short run use because, once you’re caught, you can be penalized by a search engine or even banned.
Black hat techniques seem tempting, but watch out. Black hat is the gateway drug to SEO’s dark underworld. I’m sure Vader felt like he was trying to get ahead, but once you get the ball rolling with the dark side, pretty soon you’re breathing heavy and chopping off people’s hands.
Are there commonly used techniques that may fall under black hat’s dark shadow and shouldn’t? Perhaps a technique has a bad rep and you want to advocate it. Please confess with feedback on these or other black hat SEO thoughts.
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Ben Finklea
Ben and the Volacci® team provide Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, and Conversions Consulting to a varied client base - ranging from local real estate agents to Fortune 500 companies. Ben's book Drupal 6 Search Engine Optimization was released in September, 2009 and is available from Amazon.com.
Comments
Black Hat SEO: Avoid 6
You need to avoid some tactics, generally termed Black Hat SEO, because it may cause a website to be penalized/Banned from search engines.
So below are the six popular Black Hat search engine optimization tactics:
1. Keyword Stuffing:
The more often you use your keywords on a page, the higher you keyword density. However, search engines don’t look for exceptionally high keyword density, but reasonable keyword density. If you repeat your keywords too often, search engines might think that your website is spamming.
2. Cloaking
Cloaking is when websites serve one web page to search engine spiders and a different to human visitors. This can be used to mislead the search engine with regard to the content on the website.
There are, however, some methods of cloaking which are not regarded as a deceptive, such as delivering unique content to users based on their location, or allowing search engines to index password protected pages.
3. Hidden Text
Another method of deceiving search engines with regard to a website’s content is by including hidden text. Text can be rendered invisible by setting it as the same color as the background, using negative margins, or placing it in an invisible containing element.
4. Gateway Pages
Sometimes additional websites or web pages are created with the sole purpose of ranking highly in search engines and generating traffic for another website. If these pages provide no value to visitors and are only used for rankings, your website may be penalized.
5. URL Redirection
This occurs when a user, or search engine, is unknowingly redirected to another website. Sometimes this practice is used to acquire the pagerank of the destination page. At other times, it is used to redirect users to a malicious website.
6. Link Farms
Google Pagerank and other similar ranking algorithms for other search engines place a lot of weight on link popularity. Black Hat search engine optimizers often take advantage of this by creating something known as a link farm, which is consists of a community of websites which link to each other.
Search engines have gotten progressively smarter in their quest to deliver highly relevant search results. So even if these tactics give you some success, it will only be temporary and could result in an indefinite ban of your domain name.