Black Hat SEO: What it Really Means

SEO or search engine optimization, is a term that practically all internet marketeers would tell you to capilitise on if you want to gain more traffics to your website and hence earn more! But many newbies are unsure of what is right and what is wrong when it comes to SEO. There are basically three strands of SEO, the white hat, the black hat and the grey hat. In this post, I would like to share some input on black hat SEO.

What Is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is a way of optimizing your website using tools that are not welcome by search engines. In other words, you’re somehow cheating the search engine in order to gain traffic.

Top Four Black Hat SEO Techniques

Link Farming: I think you might have encountered a lot of blogs or websites which basically receive links from several other pages or sources. All they did was to put the links in without any original content. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. Worse of all, link farming is a way to spam the search engines and they don’t like that! You don’t get good harvest from link farming.

Cloaking and Doorway Pages: This is a very old form of black hat SEO.  Using this technique, you redirect your website to one that is much more powerful that yours. When the redirection took place, you’re actually cheating the search engine to believe the site is yours. Similarly, doorway pages are fake pages that are stuffed with content and highly optimised for 1 or 2 keywords that link to a target or landing page. The end user never sees these pages because they are automatically redirected to the target page. This technique can yield a very good PageRank in a short time but it won’t last long till Google bot trace it and banned the site completely.

Meta Keywords Stuffing: Meta Keywords should be a short list of words that inform of the main focus of the page. Meta keywords have been so misused in the past that there are few if any search engines that take any heed of them. When you put too many keywords (like more than 10), your site might be ignored.

Invisible text: This is putting lists of keywords in white text on a white background (or black text on black background) in hopes of attracting more search engine spiders. Again, not a good way to attract searchers or search engine crawlers.

So try to avoid using the above black hat techniques if you do care of your search engine ranking. Having said that, you should read further on the best ways to use SEO.