All About the “Black Hat”

One of the most well known terms to search engine optimizers is “black hat”, considered to be unethical techniques being used to increase website exposure in search engines.

Ensuring they are providing relevant results to their users is the job of search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. Using “Black hat” or “Unethical” techniques to get better ranking on the search results pages, more often than not, does not provide you the information you were searching for.

For an instance, if a Webmaster wants to use Google Adsense to make money, he can do so by putting content on a webpage in case somebody would find the page, the user will click the Ad because he find the content not so useful. On the other hand, that click is money for the Webmaster.

The Webmaster’s black hat technique used to fool search engines to believe the page was relevant to the search results to poor user experience; this currently is what search engines tries to combat.

It is vital to know which website is trustworthy and what to watch out for if you are interested to outsource search engine marketing. Here are some common techniques considered Black hat:

Keyword Stuffing

There are several ways to do this. It is an unethical technique of using tags such as Meta-tags, Alt tags and title tags to stuff with your target keywords. These tags can be read by the search engines and are helpful in indicating what the page is about, however, this might ban the site once the search engines detects you stuffing your tags with keywords.

Here is an example of keyword stuffing in alt tags:

[img src=”images/my_cat.jpg” alt=”black hat, dodgy practices, black, hat, spam, unethical,hat black,black hat is cool,im spamming for black hat,practice black hat”]

As you might have noticed, the webmaster wants the search engine to detect the the keyword black hat hoping it gets better ranking in the results pages. However, if caught, the website will most likely be kicked out of the search engines.

Hidden Text

Setting the color of the font to be the same with the page background, is the common way to hide a text on a webpage; thus, users will not easily pick it up. Another way is using hidden text to load phrases and keywords into a webpage so as to increase their ranking once read by the search engine. A way to check if a site contains hidden text is to select on the Edit/Select all in your browser, if you see text, which is otherwise not visible, then this is hidden text.

Doorway Pages:

Creating a page specifically for search engines is an example of doorway page. Usually, the page doesn’t make any sense to the user. They will get the page for search engines ranking, and when a user clicks on the result from a search, they will be redirected to a different page without their knowledge.

However, looking at the description of the search results and the content when you click through that page is an easy way to detect a doorway page. If the content is not within the page content or in the description Meta-tag, then it is likely the result you saw was a doorway page.

All of these are ways that can get your site banned from the search engines, so when choosing an SEO, make sure none of these methods are being used for your website.