Be a Legitimate SEO Guru - Steer Clear of Black Hat SEO Tactics

Black hat is an unethical SEO technique that should always be avoided. Black hat attempts to gain high PR (PageRank) through “spam” tricks.  This technique presents content in both visible and invisible formats to users and search engine spiders- spiders “crawl” the web and feed pages to search engines.

Black hat is not seen as a legitimate practice in SEO because it’s only a temporary fix with search engine rankings. Steer clear of these “spam” tactics because you will get burned in the end.

The search engine police is cracking down on webmasters who attempt to fake them out with black hat tactics.  Sites caught using black hat SEO tricks are penalized and repeat offenders are banned permanently from search engines. With the popularity of blogs, web tricksters are incorporating black hat tactics into WordPress and blog platforms.  Not a good idea!  

In this competitive market, you can’t risk your site getting booted from search engines. Not only will your site vanish permanently from search engines, but if your site has a high PR you’ll lose that as well. Bottom line: black hat SEO is a LOSE-LOSE technique!

There are a wide variety of black hat SEO tactics that webmasters use. The following tactics are common black hat tricks that should be avoided:

Keyword Stuffing – Most common type of search engine “spam”. Webmasters will pack too many keywords into sites in order to bump up ranking. This is the quickest way to be penalized and kicked out of search engines.

Cloaking and Doorway Pages – Cloaking is a certain way content is presented to search engine spiders as opposed to what’s really viewed by site users. Doorway pages are a form of cloaking. They are fake pages that users never see. These pages are made to trick search engine spiders into increasing search engine ranking.

Hidden/Invisible Text – Keywords are the same color (or similar) to the background page’s color. Another trick: webmasters create images with the same text color and place the image over text. Search engines pick up the keywords but users only see the image.

“Scraper” sites – Scraper sites copy content from other sites through “web scraping.” Sites pick up open content easily from sites such as Wikipedia and pass it off as their own. This technique is usually affiliated with link farms (which is frowned upon in the legit SEO world) – a group of websites linked together through common link pages.  

Splogs – Like scraper sites, splogs (spam blogs) steal copyrighted content from other blogs. Splogs are growing in popularity and are created to promote affiliate websites and/or back links. This tricky technique attempts to artificially inflate paid ad impressions—another unethical black hat SEO practice.  

Cookie Stuffing – Cookie stuffing occurs when a user visits a site and receives a “cookie” (small string of text stored on a computer via a web browser) from a third-party site. This illegal technique is usually associated with affiliate sales to make fraudulent commissions. The cookie stays on a user’s computer for up to 60 days and is used to increase sales. If the consumer returns to the site during the 60 days and makes a purchase, the affiliate makes money off the sale – an illegal affiliate marketing practice!