The term “Black Hat” comes from the old cowboy western movies where all the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats.
Black Hat SEO is like your mailbox full of spam. It is the practice of using prohibited tricks to gain fast high rankings in the search engines. It is also a way to quickly get your site banned and removed from a search engines index, sometimes permanently. Black Hat SEO provides no long term solution for a websites visibility because most of the major search can detect a site employing these techniques. If you find an SEO company offering to do any of the following Black Hat SEO techniques listed below run away like it was a bubonic plague epidemic. These techniques will greatly damage your websites placement in the long run and you might find yourself begging to allow google for inclusion. Google provides a list of guidelines here.Below are some common Black Hat SEO techniques.
Keyword Stuffing: the practice of using a keyword or keyword phrase sometimes hundreds of times in order to trick a search engine into thinking that a page is relavant to a particular subject. It is ok to use a keyword phrase multiple times on a pages but it needs to be within about a 4% ratio to the rest of the page. This is also known as keyword density.
Cloaking: creating pages specifically for search engines to view that a user will never actually see. When search engines index a particular website a page specifically built for the search engine is brought up by a web server. These pages are often have nothing to do with the page the user will end up on.
Doorway pages: these are pages that are designed specifically for search engines and often redirect a user to another page on a website. They are created in effort to gain high rankings in the search engines but are generally full of poor content that would provide no value to a user.
Link Farms: Pages that contain hundreds of links in an effort to gain backlinks for a website. Some SEO companies will tell a client they will get them thousands of backlinks by automatically submit there website to websites and directories. There is no value to doing this because search engines are able to recognize link farms and place no value on their links, Remember back links help the most when they are from relevant, high quality websites.
What are you – white hat or black hat? Grey hat perhaps? Or do you just like to dabble but aren’t that fussed either way..?
For those of you still looking puzzled, white hat marketing is the good witch of the north to the black hat’s wicked witch of the west. Search can get a bit confusing sometimes, there’s just so much to know. In the next few weeks the Chinwag team will be getting to grips with the elusive search zeitgeist.
Today search engines include all kinds of undisclosed registers in their search programs; Google says it ranks its sites with over 200 secret techniques. It wasn’t too long ago though, that search engines were prone to abuse and manipulation from marketers, and in some ways it’s still happening. Black hat marketing tricks like burying key words and inbound links into a site to make it look more popular in search results have often landed companies in hot water.
