According to Wikipedia – Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, they often involve deception and are totally unethical. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background or positioned off screen.
So a Black Hat search engine optimization technique can be defined as a method that gets a higher search rankings by unethical means. These black hat SEO techniques often include the following:
- they break search engine rules and regulations
- they create a poor user experience precisely because of the black hat SEO techniques used on the Web page
- they present content unethically both visually and or non-visually to search engine users.
In the beginning many optimization techniques were acceptable but over time many users abused these techniques and so they became outlawed and known as “Black Hats” Often these techniques provide only short term gains up the rankings and once discovered you may be seen as a “Spammer” and often will be penalized by the search engines.
Avoiding Black Hat SEO Techniques
- Keyword stuffing: Keyword stuffing happens when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in its content. Putting huge numbers of keywords and no real content on your site will eventually catch up with you and mean the search engine will penalize you. Learn how SEO can help your business manage ethically and effectively your Online Reputation Management.
- Webcrawlers and Invisible text: A Webcrawler, sometimes called a spider, is a program that automatically retrieves a website. These are used to feed pages to the search engines and because most Web pages contain links to other pages, a webcrawler can begin anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. By using invisible text – white text on a white background, they aim is to attract more search engine webcrawlers.
- Doorway Pages: A doorway page is a false page that users will never see. It only exists for the search engine webcrawlers and spiders, it then attempts to trick them into ranking the site higher up search results.
Using Black Hat techniques may have some appeal to ensure your web page is seen in the search engine results and to some degree these SEO tricks work, but it is only a temporary measure. But it is not worth the risk and your website may even end up banned for using unethical practices. Use ethical and accepted practices of search engine optimization techniques to get your site’s ranking higher up the search results, and keep away from the Black Hat SEO.