What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to unethical techniques used to get higher search page rankings for a website.
The unethical techniques usually go against the rules and regulations of the search engine companies and can lead to a websites ranking being penalised or even a complete ban from being listed in search results.
In some cases these methods can impact the usability and accessibility of a website leading to an overall poor user experience.
Some of the back hat methods, such as “keyword stuffing” were considered normal practice a few years ago until the search engine companies recognised that the practice was skewing the search results, often returning irrelevant results to frustrated searchers.
Companies such as Google started to change their search algorithms, looking for these methods and penalising the “offending” website by giving it a lower rank.
Webmasters started to catch on to what was happening and dropped the method in favour of those which would not penalise the website and hence give their website a higher ranking. This is called “ethical SEO”, “white hat SEO” or just regular SEO.
Black Hat SEO Methods To Avoid
- Keyword Stuffing – Cramming long lists of keywords and synonyms directly onto a page is a sure fire way of getting your website penalised. It also does make your web page look very appealing. Your website content should be optimised for a particular keyword phrase, written in to the page content in a “natural” way.
- Hidden Text – Lists of text the same colour as the background or shifted off the visible area of the page is another violation of search engine rules. This is really a more devious version of keyword stuffing and started appearing shortly after the latter was being picked up on and penalised by the search engines.
- Doorway Pages – These are dynamic “fake” pages that a real person will never see. They are built to recognise search engine crawler bots and serve them a fake page optimised for a particular keyword in the hope of fooling it into giving the page a higher ranking. Real users are directed to the normal page.
- Link or Content Farms – Pages of unrelated links and snippets of optimised content whose purpose is solely to increase the number of links to and mentions of a website. Used to trick the search engines into thinking a web site is popular and worth a higher rank.
Don’t get caught out – learn how White Hat SEO can boost your website rankings.
