What is Blackhat SEO

Monday, 29 June 2009 11:07

Google's informal motto - "Don't be Evil" is reflected in the principals behind Google's page ranking in that they actively try and penalise websites that engage in less-than-ethical practises to get their site's listed on the front page of search results. One reason why you shouldn't employ them - it's hard to become un-blacklisted.

Black Hat SEO are techniques used to improve search engine results page (SERP) performance in an unethical way. Unethical because they break search engine rules and create poor user experiences. While not 'illegal', these techniques are frowned on by search engines and the SEO community. Although they work in the short term, if you are contemplating paying someone to improve your SERP ranking and they employ any of these techniques you risk getting your site de-listed. Also, the results are not sustainable so you're likely wasting your money anyway.

These techniques include:

• Keyword stuffing - where keywords are repeated throughout a site, often with no other content. Sometimes the keywords are completely unrelated to the 'real' content, but are ones that people will click on (I'll leave what these words are up to your imagination).
• Invisible text - adding keywords in ways the user can't see them.
  • behind images
  • as white text on white backgrounds
  • tiny text
  • embedded in code.
• Cloaking or shadow domains and doorway pages - sites or landing pages full of keywords but which redirect the user to another page or site.

Maybe not black hat, but of dubious value is submission to "100's" or even "1000's" of directories.

There are people (supposed SEO experts) who will dazzle you with a high Google ranking in "just 45 minutes" or similar - and it can be done. But ultimately its not sustainable and hard to fix if you get banned - Google represents nearly 70% of search engine usage so it would not be a trivial matter if they dumped your site off their lists.

Good SEO takes time and effort to do and to get results.