Black Hat SEO attempts to employ techniques that are not recommended as part of a good SEO design. This is because it focuses on improving page rankings using deceptive tactics which are disapproved by search engines. One basic truth that one needs to know about Black Hat SEO is that it may produce a high web page ranking, however, these results may only last temporarily since sites using such techniques will eventually be banned or penalized when they are discovered utilizing these tactics. This penalty on using Black Hat SEO techniques can either be in the form of reducing the website’s ranking or totally removing the site’s listing from the database through search engine algorithms or by manually reviewing the website.
There are several approaches that webmasters can adopt in Black Hat SEO. These can range from keyword stuffing, page stuffing, invisible text, farm links to many more similar techniques to deceive search engines and obtain maximum visibility and ranking. These methods do not adhere to search engine rules and regulations and create a poor user experience.
Some Common Black Hat SEO Techniques:
Keyword Stuffing – By keyword stuffing we mean distorting search engine results by overloading the web page content with long lists of keywords you wish to rank for. It involves repeated use of a word or phrase to improve a page’s relevancy.
Hidden Text – This involves inserting text that is mostly repetitive use of keywords usually placed at the bottom of the page. This hidden text is text colored to blend with the background of the page and is invisible to the user visiting the page. The concept behind this Black Hat SEO strategy is that the search engine spiders can detect the hidden text even if people cannot see it as these spiders read the page’s content through the HTML code. Few search engine spiders can make out and also disregard any text that is used to blend with the page’s background color.
Page Stuffing – This is another widely used technique to attract traffic from search engines. Here the variations of the web page that is replicated or slightly changed are submitted to the search engine. The possibility of all these variations resulting in top rankings on the search engine is high if the page does well for a particular word or phrase.
Cloaking – Page Cloaking means using one webpage for the search engine that crawls the site and then altering the webpage to show another page to users. This alteration of web pages is used as a practice to trick the search engines. This can deceive users about the content they will see when clicking on the search results.
Meta Tag Stuffing – Meta Tag Stuffing is another technique of adding keywords in a webpage without overloading the page with keywords. However, when using this tactic, high traffic keywords are placed in the page which is totally irrelevant to the web page content. This is done only to boost additional traffic to the site regardless of the fact that these keywords do not match the website content.
Link Farming – Link Farming involves exchanging shared links with other websites to enhance SEO. The main purpose behind this tactic is to increase the amount of websites that will link to your site. This is because search engines like Google rank websites based on the quality and quantity of other websites linking to your site. You can gain a top ranking in search engine results if more sites are linked to yours as this signifies that your site has high popularity among internet users. However, link farming is considered to be a spamming technique and can lead to your site getting banned.
Cheating the system through all these Black Hat SEO techniques temporarily boosts visitor traffic; however, since users usually don’t like to be deceived, the profitability of these methods is questionable. People would not like to visit a site that does not offer what it claims to be. Besides, majority of the search engines also impose penalty on web sites employing Black Hat SEO tactics, which signifies that webmasters gain a short term victory and a long term failure.
Black Hat SEO may be quite tempting to use as it does produce the desired results, though temporarily. But its really not worth the risk for the spamming techniques it uses and can potentially lead to your site getting banned. Therefore, it is advisable to use efficient and ethical search engine optimization (White Hat SEO) to get a higher ranking for your site.
