Black Hat Web Design - The 5 Main Culprits - page 2

by Sasch Mayer, 9/30/2007

3. Doorway Pages

This technique became popular around the middle of 2005, when a large number of Black Hat web design companies suddenly sprang up and offered clients 'guaranteed top 10 positions' through the use of 'sitemaps'. These sitemaps however were little more than doorway page directories containing a large number of pages, each featuring nigh on identical content, optimised for interchangeable keywords. Like all Black Hat strategies, search engines soon caught up with this approach. These days it is gradually falling out of favour since the results it produces are diminishing.

4. URL Redirects

This approach is most commonly used in conjunction with doorway pages, since these rarely provide any worthwhile information for visitors. In these cases, a redirect is put in place to automatically shunt visitors to another part of the site (most often the homepage) in order to try and attract their attention before they have a chance to hit the back button. As fast as search engines root out the new and interesting ways used by Black Hat web design companies to redirect visitors, these operators are finding new ways to circumvent the existing algorithms and so the cat and mouse game continues. Once again, the major loser is always the customer.

5. Duplicate Web Sites

This is conceivably one of the most petty tactics employed by Black Hat web design companies. The concept is simple; copy your competitor's high ranking web site, make a few minor adjustments and launch it on a different domain. Fortunately the major search engine's duplicate content filters have now become sophisticated enough to detect such incidents, thus making this particular strategy impractical unless sufficient changes are made to the site to escape detection.

As a webmaster or online business owner, you always have the option of reporting spam web sites found by you during your regular surfing activities.nThis may on the face of it seem like an underhanded tactic in itself, but is there really any reason for competitors to use Black Hat web design strategies when you are playing by the rules?

Go to article page:

Please note: the following 'About the author' box is written by the article author and its inclusion is a condition of putting the article on this website. It does not represent the views of Homepages Online.

About the author

A writer with well over a decade's experience, Sasch Mayer currently lives in Cyprus where he writes web site content, articles and more for IceGiant Web Design. Visit our site for information, quality web services and further, non-syndicated articles.

Why Are Long Tail Keywords So Important?

Long tail keywords is a term you will often come across in hpol_abbreviation_seo01 circles, and basically refers to the less popular keywords that get fewer searches per month in the search engines, but are easier to rank highly for, because there are far fewer sites competing for that term. Read 'Why Are Long Tail Keywords So Important?'.

Article categories

Latest articles

Keyword Research Strategies For Article Writers

If you write articles, you probably know how important it is to use keywords in helping to get them indexed by search engines, and in getting the attention of publishers who might want to use your content. Read 'Keyword Research Strategies For Article Writers'.

Are You Targeting The Wrong Keywords?

Like it or not, the keywords and phrases you select to describe your site within your META tags and body text can make or break your listings in the search engines. It's a sad fact that most companies are targeting the wrong keywords and losing traffic as a result. Even sites that have excellent rankings will not benefit if those rankings are for unsuitable keywords. Read 'Are You Targeting The Wrong Keywords?'.

Professional Keyword Research Strategies

Keyword research is an integral part of any SEM initiative, whether it may be PPC or SEO, so it's important to do it right. Its also important to do it right from the start, Google spiders (the bots that indexes web pages) can takes up to months before they cycle to your site, so if you target the wrong keywords initially, it could take months to fix. Read 'Professional Keyword Research Strategies'.