What is Black Hat SEO (and how to avoid it)
In the effort to optimise their website every webmaster comes up, sometimes by design and sometimes by accident against SEO techniques which are on the search engine’ banned practises list.

The temptation is understandable. After all, you have worked hard, as a webmaster, on creating your website. You put a lot of time, effort and money in its development and you want it to feature high on the organic search engines results page (SERPs). So, you can, at times be tempted to apply the so called Black Hat SEO techniques.

Ok, before we even explore what these are I will tell you this. Google and the other two major search engines (Yahoo! and BING) are very strong on their response to websites which get flagged up on their radar. Not too long ago (at the beginning of 2007 as a matter of fact) no less a firm than BMW had had its wrist slapped by Google for hiring a firm which used Black Hat SEO techniques.

BMW.de simply disappeared off Google’s database like it never existed and this applied to all it listings. A Google statement on the subject read: "We can confirm that BMW.de has been removed from our search results. We never comment on the specifics of individual cases but we would stress that the quality of our index and search results is of the utmost importance to Google."

At the same time a Black Hat SEO firm called Traffic Power which had huge corporate customers disappeared off Google’s listing along with everyone on a client list that was 10,000 clients long!

This is how seriously Google takes anything which appears to be Black Hat SEO and how swiftly it penalizes it. Having said that, Traffic Power was able to grow and continue to grow and attract clients because its techniques worked and because it was there for years.

Black Hat SEO Techniques
This is where things tend to get a little sticky. Black Hat SEO techniques are usually techniques which try to manipulate a search engine to place a site higher irrespective of the actual content of the site. It is this, more than anything else, which aggravates Google as it affects the relevancy of the search engine page results.

Of course, everything we discuss in Help My SEO tells you how to manipulate the search engines a little, the difference is that what we advocate I safe, ethical and permanent and will only result in high rankings and more traffic for a long time.

Black Hat techniques are transient. Google looks at them and adjusts its algorithm to discount them, whereas White Hat SEO techniques are permanent and produce lasting value. Finally, as seen in the example with Traffic Power above, Google can and does simply drop sites from its index if they are caught using Black Hat SEO techniques.

  • Invisible text. Never put white text on a white background. In fact, don't put even very light yellow text on a white background. The search engine bots can usually figure out there is no contrast and this will raise red flags.
  • Cloaking. Google knows what's on your site because its bot has been there. Cloaking means showing one page to Googlebot and a completely different page to real human visitors. Google despises this activity and will actually ban sites that employ cloaking scripts.
  • Keyword Stuffing. The engines want your pages to be natural. Finding every place possible to cram your keywords onto your pages or writing a "paragraph" of nothing but keywords, especially if they're repeated ad infinitum is a big red flag raiser.
  • Doorway pages. A doorway page is a page built specifically for the purpose of ranking well in the search engines and has no real content of its own. It usually then links to the "real" destination page, or automatically redirects there. Doorway pages are a popular choice of some SEO firms, although Google has cracked down on this and many webmasters have seen their pages disappear from the Google index.
  • Spam. Spam has a special meaning with regards to SEO: worthless pages with no content, created specifically for the purpose of ranking well in the engines. You think they have what you're looking for, but when you get there it's just a bunch of ads or listings of other sites. The webmaster is either getting paid by the advertisers, or the page is a doorway page, with the webmaster hoping that you'll click over to the page they really want you to go.
The point of all this is that now that you know what Black Hat SEO is there really is no excuse in employing any. Whatever short-term gains you will make will be lost soon enough and it will be a permanent loss.

SEO Tip Summary: Black Hat SEO is activity usually engaged in as a means of desperation. If you are really desperate for your site to do well and you have real value in terms of content and services or products you are selling you would do best to just go through each of our SEO articles here and employ each piece of advice.

SEO Tip Action Plan: Think, your site is your business and burning it to the ground is never worth it. Make sure you understand what Black Hat SEO is and avoid it like the plague.

David Amerland is the author of the Search Engine Optimization book: SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google's #1 page published by New Line Publishing and available to buy from Amazon.com and any quality bookshop. The ebook version of the book is available for Amazon Kindle as well as  Mobipocket, smartphone and Sony eBook Reader formats and available to purchase from any quality ebook retailer. You can also purchase it directly from this website. He masterminds winning SEO strategies for complex online business and helps the average webmaster get their site to the position it deserves. David has been instrumental in taking websites to the top of Google's first page in a way that has kept them there year after year. If you would like David to work on one of your SEO projects drop us a line with your request.

 

 


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