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Black Hat SEO

Guest post by: michelle crossley

Article Overview: Black Hat search engine optimization is a technique that is used to get high search rankings in an unethical manner. Contrary to White Hat SEO, black hat techniques are characterized by breaking search engine rules and regulations, a poor user experience by unethically presenting content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

Black Hat SEO

What is Black Hat SEO? Black Hat search engine optimization is a technique that is used to get high search rankings in an unethical manner. Contrary to White Hat SEO, black hat techniques are characterized by breaking search engine rules and regulations, a poor user experience by unethically presenting content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users. Popular Black Hat Tactics Keyword Stuffing: Keyword stuffing or over-optimization can result in SE penalties. Because keywords are such an important part of the substance of your website content, they require extra special attention. Keyword stuffing is overloading the content or meta tags of the web page with every possible keyword or phrase that relates to the site in many different forms. Keyword stuffing doesn’t work because when the search engine crawler examines your site, its algorithm can quickly determine if keywords are used unreasonable number of times. If your site contains an unnaturally high density of one single keyword, your site will actually drop in the rankings rather than rise. Hidden text: Hidden Text is text that is set at the same color as the background or very close to it. major search engines now have the ability to recognize that white text is being displayed on a white background or pink text on a pink background. While undetectable at this time to the search engines this is blatant spam and websites using this tactic are usually quickly reported by competitors and the site blacklisted. Doorway pages are Web pages designed and built specifically to draw search engine visitors to your website. Generally the content on these pages provide no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in hopes that once a visitor lands there, that they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Doorway pages as giant banner ads, only worse! As a rule of thumb, if you can't reach the page by following the site navigation, then it is a doorway page. a quick report to the search engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine content pages. Cloaking: Also known as stealth, a technique used by some Web sites to deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving an entirely different page to everyone else. The search engine thinks it is selecting a prime match to its request based on the meta tags that the site administrator has input. However, the search result is misleading because the meta tags do not correspond to what actually exists on the page. if you're considering cloaking: many of the search engines will block your listing if they find out about it. Link Farming: Are you a victim of constant of receiving "I linked to your website, I would love it if you would link back to mine" emails? Pages with countless links to other websites were created during the fervor of link popularity when it was thought that the more links that linked to your website, the higher your website ranked in search engines. It didn't take long for search engine databases to become clogged up with pages upon pages that did nothing more than link to websites. With this tactic, multiple sites show up in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported. Why Black Hat SEO Is Bad These Tactics Are Considered Black-Hat For A Reason. You’ll hear about them from other SEO's. Remember these are not legitimate tactics and while some may work in the short term, they will Get Your Website Penalized /Or Banned Eventually. Whether this is through the use of doorway pages, hidden text, interlinking, keyword spamming or other means they are meant to only trick a search engine into placing a website high in the rankings. Because of this, sites using black-hat SEO tactics tend to drop from these positions as fast as they climb (if they do climb at all). If you have competitors that you feel are using illegitimate tactics to beat you on the search engines feel free to visit "Report Spam" websites to report spam results.

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Article Tags: black hat SEO, cloaking, hidden text, keyword stuffing, link farming, link farms, spam, unethical



Related Forum Posts
Three days later - Well, it's been only 3 days since that horrible last month of summer vacation ended, and in these 3 days my hits are back up to what they were before Black August came along. So I'm thinking that, indeed, it wasn't my new navigation bar, but simply that people were out rushing around trying to jam in activities before school started again, and now that things are back to normal in their lives... they will return to normal on my site! My site numbers had been holding steady for about 3 months, before Black August...I had hoped that the classy-looking new nav bar would actually help increase my numbers, as I think it adds a professional gloss to the whole website that was lacking before...but so far I'm just still ....steady... with those previous 3 months, not really increasing.
Re: Anyone used/using Forum Auto Submit software? - Hi GT, I wouldn't dream of using anything like this either. Your concern is indeed valid, from what I understand this kind of software is 'Black Hat' and can only get anyone using it in trouble for spamming and as you say damage their reputation. I'd advise anyone even considering using anything like this not to do it..it's simply not worth it. Take care, Carol
Re: Bad SEO techniques? - I aggre if all that you tell is called SPAM or Black Hat SEO... i thinks this ways not give you experience to do SEO better for increase traffic you're website ... better you must do SEO (on page and off page) with manually, because it's was very helped to increase traffic and PR in search engine ... Thanks for shared
Re: What I'm reading this weekend - Oct 8, 2010 - these are great! In particular, I liked "you’re already perfect" and "Smashing through the Black Wall of Fear." That's exciting that there is a new 4-hour book out. I really enjoyed "The 4 hour Workweek."
Connecting with Influential People - Thanks Martin! In "The Little Black Book of Connections", Jeffrey Gitomer suggests the following ways to connect with influential people (page 106): -Third-party introductions (best method). -Writing and publishing content. -Giving seminars/speeches so you can be perceived as an expert in your field and leader. -Attend social and business events. -Say or ask something powerful by doing research ahead of time. -Engage them by offering something of value first. Gitomer also stresses the importance of making more friends as well.


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