Black Hat Search Engine Optimization

Black Hat Search Engine Optimization is those techniques that used to get higher search result ranking by using unethical methods. These black hat search engine optimization usually contain one or more of below categories:

1. Break the search engine rule and regulations
2. Create a poor user experience directly because the black hat search engine optimization techniques utilized on the websites.
3. Unethically present the content in a different way or non-ethical way to the search engine spiders and search engine users.

Black hat SEO will provide a short term gain in the ranking result, but running these techniques on website, it will also running the risk of penalized by the search engine.
Black Hat SEO techniques to avoid

1. Invisible/hidden text or tiny text – making the text’s color same as the background color, idea to hidden the text from people seeing and to get higher ranking result by adding keyword for search engine; or smaller the font size of text.
2. Put irrelevant keyword – put the irrelevant keyword to the website which the keyword is popular but it is not related to the business of our website.
3. Trademark infringement – put the competitors’ names somewhere in our website especially in the tag which will help to increase the ranking.
4. Duplicating contents – making more than one page which is with the same contents. This will double up the tag that can increase the ranking from the search engine results.
5. Page jacking – hijacking or stealing the popular website contents and put it in our website with few or no changes. The owner of content might not notice their content been stolen.
6. Cloaking – detecting the search engine spider when these spider visit and modifying the page content. It used to improved ranking results of own website. Using some spider or software to grab all the page in the search result index and page content, later use the information grabbed to analyze.
7. Guestbook spamming – posting some fake comment in other websites’ guestbook which will provide the linking to our website.
8. Doorway pages – A page which will using to improving the ranking result and it is not contain any real content with it. And then it will re-direct to the real destination page, or automatically re-direct. The information will not useful and interesting to internet surfer.
9. Google-bowling – submit the competitor’s website to the link farm which will might causing bad affect to that competitors such as idea to make them penalized.
10. Spamming – creating some pages with not useful contents. The pages created specifically for the purpose of getting higher ranking. The page content might be the advertisements or the listing of other websites.

Punishment of black hat SEO

1. Banned – The search engine will remove the website completely from their search engine index. One way to check whether our website is removed from search engine index is go search our website in the search engine.
2. Penalized – the search engine will decrease the ranking of our website in the search engine ranking result. The ranking dropped then the website will visit by lesser internet surfer.

By Jim Tan, Operion Founder, Jan 8, 2008