Do you know what black hat SEO is?

Posted by Anton Koekemoer on Sep 23, 2010 in SEO

Ever wondered exactly what Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) means? It is the unethical under the table way of search engine marketing. Think you don’t know about it? I am sure you have at least browsed to a couple of websites practising these bad website ranking methods.

Black Hat SEO

Keyword Stuffing: It is by repeating keywords on your page in a un user-friendly way usually hidden from the viewer. It is an attempt to manipulate your page ranking and search engines takes note of this.

Invisible Text: Exactly as the heading suggests “invisible text”. Example: using a white background with white text. Once more the user can’t see the text because it is hidden and it is focused on search engine bots and crawlers

Cloaking: Search engines knows what is on your website as their spiders crawl your pages periodically and adds them to their index. Cloaking means showing a page to the search engine crawlers and a completely different one to the users browsing the site.

Doorway Pages: A doorway page is a web page built specifically with the intention of ranking well in the search engines without any real valuable content of its own. Doorway pages usually links to the real destination page with valuable content or redirects there.

Selling Page Rank: Selling of text links to advertisers/web masters on a high page rank page that passes the page rank value onto their website.

Buying Expired Domains: There are link spammers that monitors (must be boring) DNS records for domains that will expire soon or that has recently expired. The link spammers then buys the domain and replaces the content and links with their own. Most search engines resets the link data on expired domains.

Link Spamming: Link spamming similar to link farming (see next heading). Link spamming takes advantage of link based ranking algorithms, such as Google’s Page Rank (PR) algorithm. It gives and passes a higher page rank (PR) to a website the more other highly (PR) ranked websites links to it.

Link Farming: Link farming involves the linking to websites that are not relevant for the purpose to increase the websites link popularity and PR (page rank) value.

Spam Blogs: Spam blogs better known as “splogs” are similar to link farming. Spam blogs are fake blogs created only for spamming.

Page Hijacking: Page hijacking is achieved by creating a copy of a website which shows the content similar to the original content of the hijacked website to a web crawler but redirects the user to unrelated websites.

Mirror Websites: Mirror websites is the hosting of multiple web sites all with similar content but using different URLs containing keywords in the URL. Most popular search engines gives a higher page rank (PR) to pages where the specific keyword searched for appears in the websites URL.

URL Redirection: The URL Redirection method is used by taking the website viewer to a different page without their intervention. For example using META refresh tags, javascript or another server-side method.