Black Hat SEO - What is Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO is a form search engine optimisation. It is called Black SEO because it is not by any means ethical SEO.

Black Hat is deemed to be the naughty tricks used to gain search engine favourable positions for a website.

It is called Black Hat SEO as opposed to the squeaky clean search engine optimisation called White Hat SEO.

Black Hat SEO has been proven to work however, because it is deemed as unethical practice it can often lead to a website being penalised or banned by the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN / Live.

Here we take a look at 4 widely used Black Hat SEO techniques:

Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is used in many different ways. It is all too often used to stuff a website’s title and description meta tags with as many keywords as possible.

Other methods of keyword stuffing are making words on a webpage invisible. This is often done by blending in the words using the same colour background as the website.

A good way of searching a website for hidden words is to to swipe the page itself and look out for any words that were not clearly visible when first viewing the page. Hidden words will be highlighted in a different colour when swiping the web page.

Cloaking
This is done using many methods including the ‘noscript’ tag. Noscriptallows webmasters to develop webpages with content hidden between these tags in the page so that it will not be viewable to visitors of a website. However, content between the Noscript tags can be crawled by search engines when the website is spidered.

By using the noscript tag webmasters are able to add whatever type of content, keywords and links they like to the hidden area to try and gain favourable search engine positioning.

Doorway Page
A doorway page or website is an entry point to deliver traffic gained via the search engines to send to another website. A doorway oftentimes contains keyword stuffed content to gain a favourable position in search engines for free search engine traffic.

Once a visitor lands on a doorway page it is likely the visitor will be redirected to another website in no time at all via some means of a redirect code embedded in the page or website itself.

Link Spamming
In recent years pharmacy websites selling viagra, ciallis or similar have been by far the biggest abusers of link spamming.

Link spamming is generally used by these type of websites because many website owners do not want to place a link on their website to such sites as they can oftentimes degrade the nature of the website.

What these type of websites set out to do is gain as many links as possible from websites where they are able to post comments with links to their websites.

They will use linkspamming methods to gain links at forums, blogs and directories.

Oftentimes their posts and comments are deleted fairly quickly, however many links in posts and comments they create are evaded by the website owner and eventually these links are spidered by search engines thus giving these website/s favourable search engine rankings.