What are SEO Black Hat techniques?
Black Hat SEO is often referred to when techniques are used to trick or mislead search engines into ranking websites. Most Black Hat techniques are against search engine rules and regulations. SEO Black Hat techniques can include:
- Keyword Stuffing pages – Over use of your target keyword in your web page copy
- Invisible text – Using the same colour text as the web page background creates invisible text areas on a web page
- Using doorway/gateway pages to direct traffic to your website. This involves creating several keyword dense pages to direct traffic to your main website
- Cloaking – Cloaking means showing one page to Googlebot and a completely different page to real human visitors
- Link farming – Creating a group of websites of similar content that all link to each other to improve link popularity
- Link spamming – This can include comment spam, posting excessive links on blogs and forums to improve link popularity
SEO Black Hat techniques are used by webmasters to gain an advantage in search engines. While in some cases this can pay off in the short term, Google will soon find a website that is using SEO Black Hat techniques and penalise them, or even remove the website from its index completely.
Many Search Engine Optimisation companies are using Black Hat techniques to increase rankings of their clients in the short term, then acting dumb when their clients sites lose ranking after a couple of months.
White Hat search engine optimisation is the correct method of optimising websites for major search engines. I will be writing another article this week on White Hat SEO techniques that will legally increase your rankings very quickly.
If an SEO company approaches you in the next few months promising you the world, make sure you ask them if the are using SEO Black Hat techniques, try and get as much information from them as possible about how that plan to improve your rankings and what methods they will deploy. Chances are they are a good, honest optimisation company. But at least you know what to look out for.
Hope you found this article useful, please feel free to comment.
Tags: black hat search engine optimisation, seo black hat, seo black hat techniques, seo blackhat
