By Melissa Shea | Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

First of all, you’ve got to watch this video from the SES conference in London. It’s hilarious – and will give you insight into the myriad of opinions on the Black Hat SEO industry. Click here to see the SES Conference video


So what is Black Hat SEO and why does it generate such a strong response? It’s basically using SEO techniques in a way to deceptively improve your web site’s search engine rankings. In other words – getting people to your site without actually providing quality content. It’s bad – don’t do it! But, just for grins – go over this list and see if you are doing it and you don’t even know it’s Black Hat!

Keyword Stuffing
Are you placing keywords in your text that are unrelated to the content of your page? For instance, if your web site is selling a cookbook full of delectable dessert recipes, but you know most people are looking for cookbooks for low-calorie desserts, so you fill your web site with keywords that weight conscious web surfers are using – easily found within Google keywords tool. This brings more traffic to your web site where you hope to entice them to buy your cookbook. So not only are responsible for using Black Hat SEO techniques you’re also responsible for the added inches on thousands of hips!

Hidden and Invisible Text
This technique is used by changing the color of unrelated keywords to the same color as your background. As a web developer, I have had numerous new clients tell me their last web developer or SEO company did this – I’m always a little shocked when I hear it and surprised that the client doesn’t understand that this is deceptive. So if you’re doing it on your web site – don’t – you can easily get banned by the search engines if you do.

Meta Tag Stuffing
The search engines have really streamlined meta tag guidelines in recent years, in large part to prevent this technique. Now you only need to list individual related keywords separated by commas. EX: cookbook, dessert, recipe, fattening, yummy, calories, etc. NOT: weight loss, exercise, gym membership, diet, diets, diet, diets, etc.

Link Farms
There are many services that advertise that they can get your web site listed on hundreds of web sites. Many times the web sites are all inter-linked, creating a Link Farm. Black Hat companies do this by creating a community of several hundred or thousand mirror web sites that all link to each other. So you if you use them, you do get a lot of incoming links to your web site, but they are not high-value links and search engines know who the link farms are and can penalize your web site for using them. The best way to get incoming links is to personally choose which high-value web sites relate to your services and submit your web site one at a time. It’s time-consuming, but your rankings will increase because they are links that relate to your services and it will bring the kind of targeted traffic needed to your site.

Mirror Web Sites
This can be a little controversial as it is used more widely in the internet marketing world. Mirror web sites are the practice of creating multiple web sites with essentially the same content, but with different urls containing high value keywords. For example, you have a web site promoting your delectable dessert recipes and so you create 5 web sites with virtually the same content and buy 5 different urls that use high-value keywords such as www.the-best-dessert-recipes.com, www.chocolate-dessert-recipes.com, low-calorie-dessert-recipies.com, etc, etc.

There are a long list of Black Hat techniques, which you can read about on Wikipedia. Most search engines aggressively fight these techniques by analyzing your web site content to identify potential red flags. So if you’re caught participating in any of these techniques, your web site can be banned from the search engine or dropped from rankings. Instead, fill your web site with high-value content that web uses want to read!!!! You will drive more targeted traffic, get plenty of sales, and be able to sleep at night knowing that you are not responsible for selling fattening dessert recipes to be people desperately trying to lose weight!

Tags: black hat seo, keywords, meta tags, search engines, SEO, SEO, spamming
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