SEO 101 – #8 – Black Hat SEO – Learn What to Avoid
In this short video, I’ll cover some commonly used black hat or in other words, illegal SEO techniques…that is, techniques that are frowned upon by the search engines and that could get your website banned.
Transcript
Some website owners want that “quick fix”. That is, they want to see their site rank well nearly instantly and so they’ll resort to using techniques that are frowned upon by the search engines.
Black hat SEO focuses on using techniques that often break the rules that the search engines have set forth in their guidelines.
Listed here are the website address of all three of the major search engines webmaster guidelines.
Google: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/
Yahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html
Bing: http://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-US&project=wl_webmasters
It’s important that the person who is optimizing your website become familiar with the different rules set forth by each search engine.
White hat SEO techniques on the other hand focus on building websites that have great content that is unique and promoted legitimately within the search engines.
I want to be very clear here that the reason I am giving you some of the more commonly used black hat techniques is not to encourage you to use them but rather to understand what they are so that when you come across them, you’ll understand that they could be potentially detrimental to your website.
While I don’t cover all potential Black Hat SEO techniques here, I do cover the most commonly used ones. If you happen to come across advice that suggests you use some of these techniques, I highly recommend against them if you’re looking to build a legitimate business online.
Many of these techniques do work, otherwise there wouldn’t be an entire other SEO world dedicated to these techniques. But they’re often very short-lived and you’ll find that you’ll be working ten times harder just to keep your name in the good graces with a search engine. If your site does get banned by a search engine, it is very hard to gain that reputation back.
Black Hat Tactic #1 – Keyword Stuffing. Keyword stuffing a web page means that you “stuff” your web page full of the keywords that you want to rank well for.
The one and only goal of keyword stuffing a web page is to get that page ranked well in a search engine for the keywords that it is focused upon.
Oftentimes the web page that has been keyword stuffed doesn’t contain any useful information for the web site visitor but that’s not the website owner’s goal. Their goal is to ensure that instead of you moving on to another website, you’ll click on an advertisement on the page or click on one of their affiliate links thus making them a sale.
Keyword stuffing used to be a very easy way to get your site to the top of the search engines because back when the search engines were relatively new, their algorithms were at best, archaic. It goes without saying that people soon discovered that the more keywords you placed on a page, the more likely your page would show at the top of a search engine results page, thus resulting in more visits and more sales.
Black Hat SEO Tactic #2 – Doorway pages. Doorway pages are web pages that are specifically created for the search engines. Their only goal is to get ranked well in a search engine results page for a keyword they’re using.
Typically website owners practicing the doorway page technique will create a web page specifically for the search engines and then once the search engines find that page and index it in a good spot, the website owner will then replace that page with a more “visitor friendly” web page.
Another doorway page technique is that of using a redirect. That is, you might arrive at a web page after doing a web search and then be told to “please wait while we redirect you to…” the actual destination page.
This initial page is the page that the website owner wants the search engines to see and index.
To read what Google specifically has to say about this practice, visit http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355
Yet another technique to get web pages seen in the search engines that go against search engine guidelines is that of using invisible or semi-visible text on the web pages. This technique is very similar to keyword stuffing a web page only it uses a different technique.
Here’s how this works.
Like keyword stuffing a page, this one is a little harder to detect by a typical website visitor. This technique involves placing the keywords for the page in the same color as the background of the web page or in a color so similar to the background color of a web page that it is all but undetectable by the website visitor themselves.
So if someone had a web page with a white background and they used this technique, they would then place white text somewhere on the white background that contained their keywords.
This allows the owner of the website to create a web page that isn’t “keyword stuffed” and nonsensical but rather the website visitor will see a web page that appears “normal”. That is, it will have content on it that’s worth reading and the visitor won’t be inundated with tons of keywords that make the text on the page make no sense.
Since the website owner has placed these same keywords in invisible or semi-visible text on the page, it won’t raise any red flags to the website visitor. The search engines however, will see this text because they simply read the basic code on your page.
Black Hat SEO Tactic – #4 – Cloaking. Cloaking is a technique where the web page that is shown depends upon who is visiting.
Those website owners who use cloaking on their web pages install a special script on the page that will determine if the visitor is a real person or a search engine spider. The script can determine this by the visitors IP address.
Search engines all have their own IP addresses that they use when they send a search engine spider out. Google has their own set, Bing has their own, Yahoo has their own, etc.
The script installed on a web page using cloaking uses these IP addresses to determine if the visitor is a search engine or not.
If the visitor is a search engine spider, then the spider will be shown a different web page than a regular website visitor would be shown.
The page that the search engine is shown is typically a keyword rich page specifically created for the search engine spider to get better rankings in the search engines.
Again, visit Google to see what they’re guidelines are regarding cloaking. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355
Map Spam is not necessarily an on-page black hat tactic but it is a strategy used by spammers in order to get more traffic to their websites. The way that this one works is that the spammer will search for highly competitive keywords within Google’s local listings; for example, “Pizza” and then see who out of these top local listings have not claimed their local Google listing.
If the business has not claimed their listing, the spammer will choose to edit that listing (which anyone can do if the listing has not been claimed), add in their information such as their website address; they’ll then fake a name and street address along with an email and then claim that listing for themselves. In the event that the local business actually found that their local listing had been taken over by a spammer, they’ll have to jump through hoops just to prove to Google that they are who they say they are.
While this is by far not the last word on Black Hat techniques these are some of the more commonly used ways used to trick the search engines into believing that a website is more important than it really is. I only point these out to you so that you’re aware of the tactics and knowledgeable if someone attempts to use these methods on your own website.
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