SEO

Black Hat Seo

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO refers to the unethical practice of SEO methodologies that do not adhere to search engine Terms of Service (TOS) or guidelines.

The aim of Black Hat Seo is to trick the Search Engines so as to rank higher in the search engine results. The techniques used will cause a poor users experience, will break search engine rules and unethically present content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

These black hat SEO practices actually provide short-term gains in terms of rankings, but will cause the sites using these techniques to be penalized by search engines. Black Hat SEO is actually a short-sighted solution to a long-term need of creating a great user experience and a high ranking position in the search engines.

Common Black Hat SEO techniques include:

Hidden text:

This Black Hat SEO technique involves putting text in the same color as the background and stuffing it with keywords so as to attract search engine spiders and crawlers.

Cloaking

A technique used to serve a different version of the same page to Search Engine spiders and a different version to users. This Black Hat SEO technique is purely to manipulate search engines for higher rankings.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are web pages that are created to rank high in search engine results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher.

Keyword Spamming

A Black Hat SEO technique where too many instances of the keyword are inserted into a web page without any context or use to make it keyword rich or increase keyword density.

Meta Tags stuffing

This is putting hundreds of the same keywords into your Meta tags.

Page Title stuffing

Page title stuffing is repeating keywords in your title tag without purpose. A good page title should include your keywords and the title should be different for each web page.

Linking farms

This Black Hat SEO technique involves having your site linked to sites that are solely created to link to other sites to increase their link popularity score.

These are just afew techniques that are frowned upon by search engines but you should be careful as to what techniques are used in your site for seo purposes. If you want to gain credibility from your visitors as well as search engines you should endeavor to employ ethical Seo techniques for longevity and not for short-term gains.

Article Published: Saturday 20th January 2007