Illegal Methods Used by The Blackhats in SEO
Posted by David Wiltshire on November, 13th 2008Black Hat SEO is a real problem as more and more SEO companies are set up every day. Just as a reminder, Black Hat SEO is to be opposed to White Hat SEO. Black Hat search engine optimization can be defined as the practice of using unethical techniques to make your search rankings go up.
Here is a list of the bad techniques that would get you blacklisted by the search engines.
Cloaking
As a general rule, websites designed for ease of use by visitors will attract search engine spiders. That doesn’t stop some less than reputable individuals from disguising their pages in an attempt to gain an unfair advantage. What you see is most definitely not what you get.
The information presented to the search engine is not the same that the human visitor gets to see. One example is to put in some text the same color as the background. In this way, the spiders but not the human eye can pick up keywords. This enables the website owner to present well written content but give the search engine the impression that the copy is filled with keywords, thereby attracting searches for those keywords.
Rest assured though, that if the offending site were holding a high search engine position, it would be spotted, reported and banned from search engines.
Duplicate Sites
Search engines would prefer to find unique content throughout the net. When affiliate schemes first became popular, some web owners would post duplicate sites in an attempt to outrank the site being promoted and siphon off sales from the original. Subsequently, the search engines now have procedures in place to stop duplicate sites. Sites that may have been altered slightly to avoid detection can be spotted by competitors, reported and banned.
Keyword Stuffing
The easiest to spot and most common example of “black hat” methods, keyword stuffing relies on targeted keywords being placed en masse on a web page in the anticipation of being picked up and indexed by the search engines. Usually found written in a tiny font size at the bottom of a web page in order for the main content to make sense.
Link farms
Link farms have evolved from the strategy of building inbound links in order to raise search engine rankings. Sites have been built specifically to provide links, which are not particularly relevant to the site concerned.
Search engines expect links between websites to be based on relevant content. Sites that build links of no relevance, purely for the sake of search engine optimization, can be banned from search engines, maybe for life.
Doorway Pages
Probably the easiest way to get blacklisted and lose even genuinely earned rankings, doorway pages are appended to a website, giving no value to a visitor. The page exists solely to attract search engines to the targeted keyword or phrase. These pages are usually mass-produced and posted automatically by software.
Redirects
Used in connection with doorways, redirects automatically move the visitor to a genuine page. Illegal methods are constantly being devised to beat attempts by search engines to detect this practice. The search engines do generally catch up with them and ban the sites. If not, competitors do pick up what’s going on and report the offenders.
Interlinking
A difficult tactic to track is “interlinking”. Interlinking is building several websites (sometimes dozens or even hundreds) and linking them together to build a network of links. This tactic does have some white-hat merit, remember, black-hat is the intentional deception of the search engines. Just because you have several websites linked together does not make you a search engine spammer – the internet is built on linking sites together.
What color is your hat?
Many of these practices are blatantly in use today. Some webmasters tread the thin line between illegality and shady practices. Search engine rankings can still be achieved by operating a “black hat” strategy. Generally though, any gain is at best temporary and offenders do face the prospect of being blacklisted by the search engines. SEO agencies that operate legitimately and provide good seo services, will not tolerate competitors getting an unfair advantage and will report offenders. Some bans can be permanent, but even in cases where a site is only banned for a temporary period; it is increasingly difficult to get back up the ladder.
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Respectfully, I want to correct a few things in this post.Cloaking — Cloaking is not really an issue any longer. This used to be an issue, but search engines are now programmed to eliminate sites with an excess amount of cloaked words. This was one of the easiest problems to detect because colors in web browsers are displayed using a six digit hexadecimal code. Search engines read colors using this code, and eliminate the value of any content where the foreground and background colors are identical or very close.Cloaking can actually be a problem with legitimate websites. For example if you use a dark background image with white text, but forget to change the overall background away from white, the search engines perceive the white text as being on a white background and downplay the value of that text. We’ve seen quality sites with very low page rank because of poor design.Duplicate sites — Still a problem, but search engines are getting smarter. The human factor in reporting doesn’t really exist because competitors would be tempted to create and report duplicate sites simply to reduce the value of the competition.Keyword stuffing — This is actually an important SEO technique. However, keyword over-stuffing will depreciate the value of your website. Generally speaking your keyword shouldn’t make up more than 1% of the total content of a given page.Link Farms — Were a serious problem until relatively recently. They can still be a problem because link farms have just specialized to link sites of similar content.
Posted by Jason Tweed on 14 Nov 2008Also, it’s a very good idea to check the sites that you have placed links to on your pages. A reciprocal link exchange between 2 relevant sites is usaully a good idea. But it is extremely important to make sure that your link partners are not implementing any black hat tactics.Google does take into consideration the quality of your link partners and the site that has it’s link placed directly on yours. Guilty by association? In the eyes of Google, this is very true. I usually check the staus of my link partners once a month to see if they’ve been banned or if their PR is dropping. If I get suspicious, I just remove their link before any negative impact starts to effect my site.
Posted by Branson Computer Repair on 19 Nov 2008Most of the techniques are related to SEO that is commonly used by the providers. You have just stripped it to naked.
Posted by Work At Home on 22 Nov 2008