Black Hat search engine optimization is 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:
1. One who breaks search engine rules.
2. Unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.
These black hat SEO practices will actually provide short-term gains in terms of rankings, but if you are discovered utilizing these spammy techniques on your Web site, you run the risk of being penalized by search engines. Black hat SEO basically is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem, which is creating a Web site that provides both a great user experience and all that goes with that. A partial listing of black hat tactics is as below :
Keyword Stuffing : Repeating a keyword or words over and over again on a given web page. Google’s algorithms work very hard at trying to find pages that read like normal text not like a broken record. If they suspect you are just trying to “stuff” the content of your site with keywords, they will penalize you for it.
Cloaking : Is a technique where a webmaster will have two versions of a given web page, one version that it shows the search engine spiders, and one version that it shows the regular web surfer. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed.
Invisible Text :Â Filling a web page with text that is having the same color as the background.
Doorway Page : A highly optimized web page whose purpose is to direct traffic to other pages using either a redirect method or merely by being full of links that direct you to other web pages.
Spam Page : It is a page that is full of ads by which a webmaster makes money of it if someone clicks on them.
Interlinking : Setting up multiple websites about a given topic and having them all link to each other in order to increase their relevance and subsequently their rankings in the search engines.
Selling PR : If you have a high PR website, you sell links from your site to another for cash. Helping their site rank higher in Google and in turn making your wallet heavier.
Buying Expired Domains : Buying expired websites that had some decent PageRank in order to try and keep the site’s inbound links.
Black Hat SEO tricks work temporarily. They end up getting sites higher search rankings until these sites get banned for using unethical practices. It’s just not worth the risk. Use efficient search engine optimization techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like Black Hat SEO.
