Black Hat SEO (Part 1): Strategies That Can Hurt Long-Term Success
Published November 06, 2009 - RSS/XML Feed RSS
 
When it comes to effective SEO practices, it’s not always what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you “know” which is not true. There are many  myths going around about SEO these days and if you begin to accept these myths as truth and put them into practice in order to build your SEO, you may find yourself MUCH worse off at the end than you were in the beginning. The purpose of this article is to separate the fact from the fiction in regard to some of the popular SEO myths, beginning with the SEO practices known as “Black Hat SEO.”

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is a set of sneaky or aggressive SEO strategies which focus on only appealing to the search engines and not to human visitors. Black Hat SEO is most often used to make a quick buck off of a website instead of building long term relationships with customers. It is this focus on a quick ROA, which causes some to use Black Hat SEO assuming that the risk of being banned or penalized by the search engines is worth the potential rewards.

Black Hat SEO Methods

Invisible or Hidden Text

The first Black Hat SEO method is the use of text which is visible to the search engine spiders but not to people visiting your website. This can be accomplished by putting white text on a white background or by giving it a font size of zero. The purpose of this is to cram the site with keywords in order to get it to rank well with the search engines and to thus attract more visitors. Google clearly states that they are against this kind of practice in their SEO guidelines. This is because Google’s main concern is to provide people with relevant content when they type a search term into the Google search box.

Keyword Stuffing

The next Black Hat SEO practice is the excessive use of keywords for which the site owner wants the website to rank in the search engines. This Black Hat SEO practice is sometimes combined with invisible or hidden text in order to load a website with the keywords without them appearing in the content too many times. However, keyword stuffing is also done using unnatural repetitions of keyword phrases within the visible content such as in this example using the term “search engine optimization:”

Search engine optimization is something that your site search engine optimization expert who knows search engine optimization needs to use his search engine optimization skills to improve…

Again, this is clearly something which would not appeal to a human visitor and is only being done for the sake of appealing to the search engine spiders.
 
Cloaking

This Black Hat SEO method involves complex coding which enables you to show one page to Google and an entirely different page to your visitors. This is a very sneaky Black Hat SEO practice and one which is not only despicable to Google, but it is bordering on unethical. After all, you are telling Google that if they index you that you are going to give your visitors something which you are not actually going to give them. Many sites have been banned from the search engines because they have been caught using cloaking to boost their rankings.

Doorway Pages

A doorway page is basically a page which is created for the sole sake of ranking well with the search engines. It’s content will not be completely relevant with the content of the site which it directs you to, it is simply created for the means of getting you site ranked. This is an approach which has been, and still is, being used by many SEO firms. However, since these kinds of pages are being removed from the Google index frequently, SEO firms are calling them by different names. However, if the page is created simply for the sake of ranking your site and has no other valuable function you can bet that Google is going to treat it just as they could any other doorway page.

Link Farming

A link farm is basically a site which has nothing but a bunch of links and no content or value for the visitor. The sole purpose of a link farm is to rank with the search engines by filling a site up with ads which use the keyword for which the site is being optimized. The idea is that the use of the many keywords will get the site ranked with the search engines and that the site owner will then be able to receive a decent ROA by selling ad space to sites who have offers consistent with those keywords.

Cultivating Good SEO Practices

If you look at all of these Black Hat SEO practices you’ll find that they have one thing in common: all of them are completely unsuitable for a human audience. They can also cause you to be penalized by the search engines which can cost you a huge drop in ranking or in some cases they can get your site completely removed from the Google index. In order to avoid falling prey to these penalties you can ask yourself these questions regarding your strategies:

- Are these strategies going to help me to build trust and credibility with my visitors?
- Could I accomplish better long term results if I used a different strategy?
- Am I building a site which I would feel comfortable referring my friends to?

Remember, the search engines are marketing to the same people that you are and those people want the same thing from you that they want from Google, MSN or Yahoo. They want to find the content they are looking for without having to get the run around and be sent to a site which has nothing to do with what they are searching for. If you focus on giving people want they want, you will eventually win them and the search engines over.
 
Google’s Take on Black Hat SEO

Webmaster guidelines
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Cloaking and sneaky Redirects
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355

Hidden Text and Links
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353
 
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