Black Hat SEO

Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

* breaks search engine rules and regulations

* creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site

* unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

We should avoid Black Hat SEO

Typical practices that a Black Hat will use, and WILL get your site banned from Google eventually are:

1. Hidden Text

One of the main ways Google ranks your site is based on the content of the site itself, therefore large amounts of keyword rich content should get you ranked quite well. A black Hat will add large amounts of text to a webpage but make it invisible to the user, this is because the text will often not make much sense and make a well designed website look terrible. Text can be hidden by using white text on a white background, using javascript to hide the text and also using cascading style sheets to hide the text.

2. Keyword Stuffing

This is normally used with the above technique. Google ranks a site depending on how relevant to a keyword it thinks it is, therefore if a keyword appears a lot of times it is likely to be relevant. However keyword stuffing normally consists of gibberish made up of the keywords to fool the Search engine into ranking it higher.

3. Cloaking / Doorway Pages

This technique will also be used with keyword stuffing, and is similar to hidden text but more advanced. Pages are created that are only visible to a search engine, these will often be filled with keyword rich content and therefore get a page ranked highly. Regular suffers will be redirected away from these pages to the original page the webmaster wants you to see. This is done using either IP redirecting or based on the HTTP referrer request. As with all computer networks Google has an IP address, or in Google’s case a lot of IP addresses, a Black Hat can deliver content to the user based on an IP address so if they see it as one of Google’s spiders it will deliver the keyword rich content. The other technique is to only deliver the original content if you have come from a major search engine using the HTTP referrer request. This will mean you lose small amounts of traffic from traffic from directories but it is made up by the increased traffic from the search engines.

4. Unnatural Link Building

Another popular Black hat technique where the Black Hatter will build thousands of back links to your site using various techniques, quite often this can be seen using Yahoos Link too to view the links, if a site is relatively new but has thousands of back links then there is a chance it will be a from Black Hat techniques. The link building techniques used typically are:

* Comment Spamming - The Black Hatter will spam thousands of Blogs with your link.

* Forum Spamming - As above but with forums.

* Link Farms / Link Exchange Programs - Though exchanging links is not really Black Hat some companies will install code onto websites that exchanges links with thousands of other websites, they will also generate thousands of “micro sites” which have thousands of links within them. Micro sites tend to be keyword stuffed sites used primarily for link massive link building.