Black hat techniques are used to help boost your rankings that the search engines do not like. There are many black hat techniques that are used today I will go over some below.
Keyword stuffing
The Keyword meta tag used to be a high ranking factor a few years ago but SEOs started to abuse them to gain higher rankings. Keyword stuffing is constantly repeating keywords, both on your page and in your meta titles to try and gain better rankings.
When the search engines look at a sites content to see if it’s relevant for a certain keyterm/phrase they look to see if that word(s) is/are mentioned on that page. If a page mentions “web design” a lot then it must be relevant for that term.
With this being a ranking factor some SEOs will keep repeating the keyterm over and over again to try and boost that page, using this technique can harm your rankings rather than improve them and it’s also not very good for visitors they do not want to keep reading the term “web design” repeated every few words as it does not read well and is very off putting.
Hidden Text
Was also bigger years ago more than it is today, it can also be linked with keyword stuffing. As people do not want sites with over used keyterms people sometimes hide them on their page so you are unable to see them but the search engines can, this techniques is used to try and trick you and the search engines.
Hidden text is either hidden by making the text the same colour as the background or setting the font size to 0. Hidden text is usually at a bottom of a page on a white background. But hidden text does show up on the page source and search engines can now easily detect hidden text.
Link Farms
Link farms are just websites with tons of random links on them and have no informational purpose what so ever, they are used only to try and boost rankings.
Bad Neighbourhood Sites
Linking to a bad neighbourhood site typically with a reciprocal link can harm your ranks, what bad neighbourhood actually means is, if a site is doing something that Google does not like they could take it you are involved , otherwise why would you have linked to them.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique where one page is given to the search engines and a another is given to the visitors. This technique is used to help pages rank well for terms they would not normally rank well for, and help boost there rankings.
Doorway pages
Doorway pages are pages that are keyword rich and are there just to send visitors to a different page that you want them to go to. They are created for the search engines and generally read very badly and include lots of keyterms in a specified niche to try and rank t higher. A “click here” or meta refresh HTML are also used.
Content Scrapping
This is used when people don’t write their own content for their websites, they just go out and use other peoples and try and change it to make it their own, this goes into the duplicate content issue and if your websites content is copied from elsewhere your site will not rank, but the original source will.
Grey Hat Techniques
These techniques sit on the fence between white and black hat, some SEOs use them and some stay well clear.
Auto Software
Some SEOs use automated software to build links, these software’s are used to save time and while they get plenty of links they are of poor quality which will offer very little success.
White Hat
The way to go is to stick to white hat techniques for better search engine visibility and to make sure your site never gets penalized.
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