Black Hat SEO

What is Black Hat SEO?

In it's simplest form it is the practise of fooling a search engine to rank you at the top of their results for certain keywords when you may not deserve to be there. There are a number of techniques that can be employed to get you high up in the rankings, but it is important to remember that if you do it wrong you get the opposite and even see yourself disappearing from the rankings altogether.

Examples of Black Hat SEO tactics

• Keyword Stuffing - This is the process of putting your keywords into the text on your page over and over again to the point where it may be unreadable. A good example of keyword stuffing can be seen in this amusing article on the Dark Side of SEO. Google and other search engines are getting very good at detecting keyword stuffing now and if detected it is likely you will get a penalty.
• Cloaking - this is the process of setting your website up so that the search engine sees a different page to the user. Usually the page that is shown to the search engine is stuffed with the relevant keywords. This is not liked at all by the major search engines and many of them have developed programs to detect this kind of action.
• Hidden Text - this is the process of stuffing your keyword into your webpage but making the text the same colour as the background so that the user cannot see it but search engines can read it. Search engines are very good at detecting this so the Black Hat SEO guys have moved on to using cascading style sheets, just as bad and can still get you penalised.
• Doorway Pages - these are pages that have been optimized to appear high in the rankings and are not relevant to your site. Once the user lands on them they will redirect you to the website.
• Duplicate Content - This is the process of having several websites or webpages with essentially the same content on. Search engines regularly check whether content is being replicated and will penalise a site if it contains duplicate content. The problem is that search engines do not know if your site was the first to have the content or not. Check your content is not being used by someone else.
• Link Farms - This is the process of having multiple websites and linking them all up to each other for no reason other than to increase PageRank. Google checks the relevance of links so this will usually only result in your site being penalised.

Conclusion

When looking for an SEO Company, if they offer you any of the above as an option think very carefully before you accept. You may get to the top of the search engines for a short time and then find you are banned and have to start all over again. It is important to remember that there is no quick fix with getting to the top of search engines and you should question anyone that is offering one.

Resources

Google Webmaster Guidlines

Google's Search Engine Optimization advice and what to be aware of. 

Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidlines