Identifying Black Hat SEO…..

Black Hat SEO – a term that is often thrown around, and is the arch enemy of search engines over the world.

What is Blackhat SEO?

Black Hat SEO,  or “Unethincal SEO” (I hate that term – search engine “ethics” is the not usually the first thing that comes to mind when creating a website…), is basically websites that try to rank higher on search engines by using techniques that are frowned upon by those search engines.

These techniques are designed to trick, or fool the search engines into thinking a website is more important for certain keywords than they actually are (or maybe they are, but there are not enough users who have yet found it and linked to it to think so themselves)…

Activities that compromise the quality of search results and gives a poor user experience…

The biggest problem with Black Hat SEO is that it tends not to provide a lasting solution of ranking well on search engines. White-hat SEO, in contrast, tends to have a much longer life span and growing potential.

Also there is the problem of possibly getting penalised by Google (or banned if you are a really naughty boy). This is where Google realises you have been trying to beat it’s alogorithms and they put you down in the rankings for keywords, kill your page rank and even throw you off all together.

How is Black Hat SEO used?

Well,  since you are interested you might ask for unethical route practices and how to define the Black Hat SEO.

• Keyword Stuffing - The number of times keywords are used really makes a difference. Typically, keyword density (the number of times a keyword is repeated in the content) must be between 4% and 7%.Sometimes people deliberately increase the keyword density to try and tell bots that that word or phrase is an important keyword on that webpage. This is called keyword stuffing. This is the most common Black Hat SEO techniques.
• Keyword Masking – Basically this is keyword stuffing but instead of showing it to the user it is hidden in the website code or with using the same colour of text as background. This Black Hat SEO technique is also easily detect by search engines.
• Cloaking - Another form of doorway pages are using a method called Cloaking. They show a version of that page to the visitor, but different from the one provided to crawlers, using server side scripts. They know whether it’s a bot or a visitor based on their IP address and/or user-agent. Very naughty and and punishable by Google……
• Doorway Pages - Basically the indexed page has a redirect that sends the user to a completely different page. META refresh commands and htaccess files achieve this, but again search engines are becoming more and more advanced at tracking this kind of behaviour.
• Link Farming - Also called “spamdexing”. A link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group, trying to spam the index of a search engine. Search engines require ways to confirm page relevancy.A known method is to examine for one-way links coming directly from relevant websites. The process of building links should not be confused with being listed on link farms, as the latter requires reciprocal return links, which often renders the overall backlink advantage useless. This is due to oscillation, causing confusion over which is the vendor site and which is the promoting site.
• URL Stuffing – Sometimes you can find repeated in the same web domain. Search engines are intelligent and capable of detecting such duplication within the domain.

This sort of technology could help you achieve your goal for a short time, but it certainly does not help you maintain your success. If established, the website is prohibited and punishable by search engines, exposing yourself to all your online marketing nightmares.

Keep in mind that search engines are constantly improvise and make more intelligent. The short-term success is best to avoid. The aim of long-term success and benefits of the white hat techniques.

White Hat techniques definitely lead you through the long-term success…..