Article: Black Hat SEO

By: Alvin Ng

Black Hat SEO refers to techniques used by webmasters to optimize their websites that are not approved of by search engines, Google in particular. Why not? Because these techniques often produce websites that are not relevant to the user, which is against what Google or any other search engines is trying to achieve.

Black Hat SEO involve the use of 1 or more methods to 'cheat' the search engines into thinking that the webpage is relevant, such as spamming it with keywords that are not related to the topic.

I shall not go into too much of Black Hat stuff since I, admittedly, do not know much of this. Instead, I will talk about the common ones that you might use without even knowing it.

Keyword Stuffing
Using as many keywords as possible, spamming it to increase the keyword density. Write your content naturally, do not attempt to squeeze in unneccessary keywords and you will be safe.

A more common usage of this is to stuff keywords into the webpage title. Never ever repeat the same word in the title, and keep it to less than 80 characters.



Hidden text
Some webmasters hide their text from visitors. Why would anyone do that? Simple, because the text doesn't make sense. Usually, this is text that are stuffed with keywords. Common methods of hiding text are by placing them on a same coloured background (e.g white text on white background), or using CSS to hide them.



Link Farms
This is highly dangerous as inexperienced webmasters might link to link farms, getting their website banned. Link farms are webpages that have high number of outbound links, and little content. The purpose of them is to increase backlinks to the webpages it links to. Link farms and websites linking to it will get banned by Google.

Any website found linking to a banned website will be associated with it, resulting in a ban for that website. The websites that the banned website links to will be safe though, since it can be a sabotage from a competitor.

It is easy to identify link farms. Webpages with high number of outbound links with little or no content.

Some websites just dump all their reciprocal links on 1 page, resulting in an unintentional link farm. Always check the websites you exchanged links with periodically.



URL Cloaking
This is used to show 1 webpage to visitors, and another to show to search engines. The version for search engines usually are highly optimized (such as keyword stuffing), but doesn't make sense to a human visitor, hence the need to hide it from them.



Automated Link Networks
There are websites that participate in link programs where they gain backlinks from other members. In return, they have to link to other member websites. This type of mindless linking to websites not of your niche will not only benefit you, but risk of a ban by Google.

Link farms are considered a link network. There are newer link networks out there that are not banned by Google yet. These are more sophiscated and require a coding file to be uploaded to your website, which I have mentioned before in Building Backlinks.

I would advise you not to join such networks. They might claim that it is not black hat, but put it simply, who will admit their system is imperfect? There is a high possibility that it will be banned in future.