Black-Hat Search Engine Positioning Tactics
WARNING !!!
These Tactics Are Considered Black-Hat For
A Reason.
This Page Is To Note The Tactics That You Will Hear About From Other
SEO's.
These Are Not Legitimate Tactics And While Some May Work In The
Short Term
They WILL Get Your Website Penalized And/Or Banned Eventually.
Constantly webmasters attempt to "trick"
the search engines into ranking sites and pages based on illegitimate
means. Whether this is through the use of doorway pages, hidden
text, interlinking, keyword spamming or other means they are meant
to only trick a search engine into placing a website high in the
rankings. Because of this, sites using black-hat tactics tend to
drop from these positions as fast as they climb (if they do climb
at all).
The following tactics are not listed to help you "trick"
the search engines but rather to warn you against these tactics
should you hear they are used by other SEO's (this is not to say
that all other search engine positioning experts use these tactics,
just that some do and you should be warned against them).
Due to the sheer number of tricks and scripts used
against search engines they could not possibly all be listed here.
Below you will find only some of the most common black-hat tactics.
Many SEO's and webmasters have simply modified the below tactics
in hopes that the new technique will work. Truthfully they may,
but not forever and probably not for long.
Black-Hat Search Engine Positioning
Tactics:
Keyword Stuffing
This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of search
engine spam. Essentially this is when a webmaster or SEO places
a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes
that the search engine will read this as relevant. In order to offset
the fact that this text generally reads horribly it will often be
placed at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size. An
additional tactic that is often associated with this practice is
hidden text which commented on below.
Hidden Text
Hidden text is text that is set at the same color as the background
or very close to it. While the major search engines can easily detect
text set to the same color as a background some webmasters will
try to get around it by creating an image file the same color as
the text and setting the image file as the background. While undetectable
at this time to the search engines this is blatant spam and websites
using this tactic are usually quickly reported by competitors and
the site blacklisted.
Cloaking
In short, cloaking is a method of presenting different information
to the search engines than a human visitor would see. There are
too many methods of cloaking to possibly list here and some of them
are still undetectable by the search engines. That said, which methods
still work and how long they will is rarely set-in-stone and like
hidden text, when one of your competitors figured out what is being
done (and don't think they aren't watching you if you're holding
one of the top search engine positions) they can and will report
your site and it will get banned.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages added to a website solely to target
a specific keyword phrase or phrases and provide little in the way
of value to a visitor. Generally the content on these pages provides
no information and the page is only there to promote a phrase in
hopes that once a visitor lands there that they will go to the homepage
and continue on from there. Often to save time these pages are generated
by software and added to a site automatically. This is a very dangerous
practice. Not only are many of the methods of injecting doorway
pages banned by the search engines but a quick report to the search
engine of this practice and your website will simply disappear along
with all the legitimate ranks you have attained with your genuine
content pages.
Redirects
Redirecting, when used as a black-hat tactic, is most commonly
brought in as a compliment to doorway pages. Because doorway pages
generally have little or no substantial content, redirects are sometime
applied to automatically move a visitor to a page with actual content
such as the homepage of the site. As quickly as the search engines
find ways of detecting such redirects, the spammers are uncovering
ways around detection. That said, the search engines figure them
out eventually and your site will be penalized. That or you'll be
reported by a competitor or a disgruntled searcher.
Duplicate Sites
A throwback tactic that rarely works these days. When affiliate
programs became popular many webmasters would simply create a copy
of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it online
in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture
their sales. As the search engines would ideally like to see unique
content across all of their results this tactic was quickly banned
and the search engines have methods for detecting and removing duplicate
sites from their index. If the site is changed just enough to avoid
automatic detection with hidden text or the such, you can once again
be reported to the search engines and be banned that way.
Interlinking
As incoming links became more important for search engine
positioning the practice of building multiple websites and linking
them together to build the overall link popularity of them all became
a common practice. This tactic is more difficult to detect than
others when done "correctly" (we cannot give the method
for "correct" interlinking here as it's still undetectable
at the time of this writing and we don't want to provide a means
to spam engines). This tactic is difficult to detect from a user
standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions
on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be
reported.
Reporting Your Competitors
While this may seem a bit off, the practice of reporting competitors
that you find using the tactics noted above or other search engine
spam tactics is entirely legitimate and shouldn't be considered
at all unethical. When we take on search engine positioning clients
this is always incorporated into our practices when applicable (which
happily is not that often).
When a competitor uses unfair tactics to beat you it it entirely
fair to report them.
If you have competitors that you feel are using illegitimate tactics
to beat you on the search engines feel free to visit our "Report
Spam" page for links to where you go on the major
search engines to report spam results and sites to them. Just make
sure you're own site is clean when you do.
Also See:
White-Hat Search Engine Positioning
Tactics
Grey-Hat Search Engine Positioning Tactics
Reporting Search Engine Spam
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