Black Hat SEO

An intriduction to black-hat SEO.

Black-hat SEO refers to using techniques that are frowned upon by search engines while white hat SEO refers to using techniques that the search engines approve of. Black-hat SEO may give you a big short-term gain in rankings for your sites but may ultimately get you punished or banned. Real businesses with real sites should never use black hat techniques because white hat techniques can achieve long-term results with less risk. The differences between white-hat and black-hat is thin - and sometimes a matter of debate - but a general rule if you want to maintain your SEO is to not do anything that you think the search engines would disapprove of if they knew what you were doing.

Some Elements of Black-Hat SEO

Keyword and domain name stuffing - Adding in many of the same keyword in the meta tags or anywhere else keywords are used.
Hidden text and links. These are text or links that are the same color as the page background so they are invisible to the user but show up to the search engines.
Forums and blog spamming. Sending out "spam bots" - automated bots that put comment spam on sites, forums, and blogs.
Duplicate content. Having different sites with the exact same content. Google doesn't want you creating duplicate sites just to get better SEO.
Content scraping. Having bots point to a particular site and automatically copy it's content. This is not the same as "traditional" content copying because it is not done to attract genuine visitors who want to read the content. It is done solely to get good rankings and have visitors come to the site where they will either view and ad or clickon an ad.


Differences between black hat and white hat SEO

  • Visibility
    With white hat SEO the content and links should be visible to search engines and web site users but black-hat SEO makes the content and links visible to the search engines but invisible to users.

  • Ethics
    White-hat techniques are generally considered ethical while black-hat techniques are considered unethical by most people.

  • Relationship to search engines
    White hat SEOs look at search engines as partners that they want to work with and have a good relationship with while black-hat SEOs look at search engines as objects to be manipulated for personal benefit.

  • Reputation
    White-hats are concerned with their reputation while black-hats are only concerned with maximizing traffic. Black hats may go around the internet and spam blogs and forums and make many enemies. They don't care about this as long as their traffic is going up. White hats are usually trying to run a "real business" and are concerned about the reputation of their site or company.

  • Keyword relevance - White hats optimize their sites for keywords that actually have to do with the content of their sites. Black hats will sometimes optimize their sites for keywords that have nothing to do with their sites.

  • Goals - White hats are usually going after long-term traffic goals while black hats are usually going after short-term traffic goals. Sometimes black hats will just constantly churn web sites and create new ones with new domains after they get in trouble.


 
Bookmark this page: