Black Hat SEO
Black Hat SEO: This term refers to using deceptive or unethical techniques to get high rankings in search engines; for example hidden text, cloaking and link farms. Black Hat SEO is any optimization tactic that causes a site to rank more highly than its content would otherwise justify. Black Hat SEO tactics can also be defined as any changes made specifically for search engines that don’t improve the actual user’s experience of the website. In other words, optimizations that are not within the search engine guidelines and intended uses.
The fundamentals of Black Hat SEO include the basics elements of site optimization as follows:
Hidden Content: One of the top and oldest tricks in the book for black hat SEO techniques is hidden content. Hidden content comes in many fashions but basically it’s info within site code that will be stuffed with keywords. This content will not be visible to the end user of the site but will be picked up when a search engine spider crawls the website. Therefore it misleads the user to the end relevancy of a search query.
Meta Keyword Stuffing: There are two Meta tags that are generally used to inform search engines of the content on the page. They reside between the <head> tag of a page and when used incorrectly they can alert a search engine that a site is using spam techniques in an attempt to improve its ranking. These are: Meta Description and Meta Keywords.
Meta Description
The meta description should be used to describe the content of your page honestly and concisely and be 1 or 2 sentences, 3 at most.
Here’s an example of the meta description being used in the correct manner,
<meta name=”description” content=”DragNow are an Online Marketing agency providing a full range of digital marketing services throughout the Midwestern region of the United States. If you need Search Engine marketing or Search Engine Optimization we can help.” />
Here’s an example of the meta description tag being used incorrectly for a page promoting a restaurant called “MyRestaurant”,
<meta name=”description” content=” MyRestaurant website is the best MyRestaurant website, our restaurant is better than any restaurant, great restaurant, best food restaurant,visit our restaurant” />
Meta Keywords should be a short list of words that inform of the main focus of the page. Meta keywords have been so misused in the past that there are few if any search engines that take any heed of them.
Here’s an example of the meta keywords being used in the correct manner,
<meta
name=”Keywords” content=”Online marketing, digital marketing, search
marketing, search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, SEO” />
Here’s an example of the meta keywords tag being used incorrectly for a page promoting a restaurant called “MyRestaurant”,
<meta name=”keywords” content=” MyRestaurant,restaurants,food,feed,take away food,fast food,junk food,eat,eating
out,dinner,dining,meal,eating, MyRestaurant,steak and chips,chicken and chips,pie and chips,pudding,desert,big restaurant,small restaurant,best restaurant,great restaurant, exclusive restaurant,cocktails,wine,drink,pizza,sandwhiches”>
Doorway or Gateway Pages: Doorway or Gateway pages are pages designed for search engines and not for the end user. They are basically fake pages that are stuffed with content and highly optimised for 1 or 2 keywords that link to a target or landing page. The end user never sees these pages because they are automatically redirected to the target page.
Off-the-shelf SEO software often encourages the use of gateway pages as do SEO firms that don’t know what they’re talking about. Search engine spiders are being enhanced continually to detect these pages and will get ignored or worse still, flag your site up as being spam and ban you all together. We would definitely consider the use of Doorway or Gateway pages a Black Hat SEO approach.
Link Farming: In the real world if you were to build your house in a bad neighbour hood then your house would be affected by its surroundings. The same is true of the virtual world on the web. Link farms or free for all (FFA) pages have no other purposes than to list links of unrelated websites. They won’t provide you with any traffic and you run the risk of having your site banned for participating. Don’t participate in link farming.
