How To Get Blacklisted By The Search Engines: Black Hat SEO Techniques - page 2

by Romain Romagnan, 2/14/2007

Link farms

Link farms have evolved from the strategy of building inbound links in order to raise search engine rankings. Sites have been built specifically to provide links, which are not particularly relevant to the site concerned. Search engines expect links between websites to be based on relevant content. Sites that build links of no relevance, purely for the sake of search engine optimisation, can be banned from search engines, maybe for life.

Doorway Pages

Probably the easiest way to get blacklisted and lose even genuinely earned rankings, doorway pages are appended to a website, giving no value to a visitor. The page exists solely to attract search engines to the targeted keyword or phrase. These pages are usually mass-produced and posted automatically by software.

Redirects

Used in connection with doorways, redirects automatically move the visitor to a genuine page. Illegal methods are constantly being devised to beat attempts by search engines to detect this practice. The search engines do generally catch up with them and ban the sites. If not, competitors do pick up what's going on and report the offenders.

What colour is your hat?

Many of these practices are blatantly in use today. Some webmasters tread the thin line between illegality and shady practices. Search engine rankings can still be achieved by operating a "black hat" strategy. Generally though, any gain is at best temporary and offenders do face the prospect of being blacklisted by the search engines. SEO agencies that operate legitimately and provide good SEO services, will not tolerate competitors getting an unfair advantage and will report offenders. Some bans can be permanent, but even in cases where a site is only banned for a temporary period; it is increasingly difficult to get back up the ladder.

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About the author

Manager at White hat media. A SEO and web design agency providing a wide range of services such as web design, SEO consultancy, pay per click, email marketing... http://www.whitehatmedia.com

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