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

by Romain Romagnan, 2/14/2007

Black Hat SEO is a real problem as more and more SEO companies are set up every day. Just as a reminder, Black Hat SEO is to be opposed to White Hat SEO. Black Hat search engine optimization can be defined as the practice of using unethical techniques to make your search rankings go up. Here is a list of the bad techniques that would get you blacklisted by the search engines.

Cloaking

As a general rule, websites designed for ease of use by visitors will attract search engine spiders. That doesn't stop some less than reputable individuals from disguising their pages in an attempt to gain an unfair advantage. What you see is most definitely not what you get. The information presented to the search engine is not the same that the human visitor gets to see. One example is to put in some text the same colour as the background. In this way, the spiders but not the human eye can pick up keywords. This enables the website owner to present well written content but give the search engine the impression that the copy is filled with keywords, thereby attracting searches for those keywords. Rest assured though, that if the offending site were holding a high search engine position, it would be spotted, reported and banned from search engines.

Duplicate Sites

Search engines would prefer to find unique content throughout the net. When affiliate schemes first became popular, some web owners would post duplicate sites in an attempt to outrank the site being promoted and siphon off sales from the original. Subsequently, the search engines now have procedures in place to stop duplicate sites. Sites that may have been altered slightly to avoid detection can be spotted by competitors, reported and banned.

Keyword Stuffing

The easiest to spot and most common example of "black hat" methods, keyword stuffing relies on targeted keywords being placed en masse on a web page in the anticipation of being picked up and indexed by the search engines. Usually found written in a tiny font size at the bottom of a web page in order for the main content to make sense.

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Ethical SEO

There are various techniques of Search Engine Optimization. Broadly, these are referred to as White Hat, Black Hat and Grey Hat. Read 'Ethical SEO'.

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