Black Hat SEO - An exercise in pointless behavior

What exactly is Black Hat SEO?

In a word, it's cheating!

The whole point of SEO techniques are to get you to the top of the search engines and draw in lots of qualified traffic for your website.

To decide whether your website should be listed at the top of their search results the search engines will rank sites based on certain criteria. SEO is all about trying to understand that criteria and making sure that a website scores well against the criteria.

However there are two ways you can do this. Either you can amend your site to be more attractive to the search engines and also make sure it is still providing a good customer experience or you can exploit the rules to get your page listed high regardless of how bad it makes your website for any visitors.

This second option is call Black Hat SEO.

To give you an example. How many times have you arrived at a website to just see row upon row of the same set of words just listed? This is called keyword stuffing and it's an old technique that thankfully no longer works. It the past, search engines used to count how often a keyword appeared on a page and the more often it appeared the higher it would rank it. So of course some people went mad and typed their keyword onto the pages hundreds of times.

A few Black Hat Techniques to avoid.

Here are a list of techniques that people have tried and failed at. Don;t try them yourself. Not only do they not work, they will probably get you banned. If you have hired someone to do your SEO and they are using any of these techniques, unhire them fast!

Keyword Stuffing

We've already mentioned it. This is just listing the keyword over and over again in the failed believe that search engines still think lots of keywords are good.

Cloaking

This uses keyword stuffing but the keywords are written in the same colour as the page background. This way the human visitor doesn't see them but the search engines do.

Do NOT do this. The search engines check the colour of your font and your background colour. If they get a match you are in trouble.

Doorway Pages

A doorway page works like this. A page is set up that is optimised for a set of keywords in order to rank high in the search engines, However if I were to click on the page in the search results the doorway page would instant redirect me to another page. The idea is that you set up lots of doorway pages for various keywords and the redirect people to where you want them to go on your website. It's pretty annoying as a visitor to think you are going to one page to only end up at another.