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What is Black Hat SEO?
Ok, so you're probably wondering where the term 'black hat' came from. In Western films (... yes, stay with me), the bad guy or villain will usually wear a black hat, whereas the good guy will generally wear a white hat. The computer industry also refers to a black hat as a 'malicious hacker', so you can see that anything to do with 'black hat' comes with a bad reputation.
Regarding SEO, black hat is the name given to the general means of trying to 'cheat' your way higher up into the search results.
Does it still work?
Actually, yes. Various Black Hat techniques will make a website rank very well in the search results... but not for long.
These days, search engines are very quick to pick up on this and have no doubts that the offending website will be prompty banned from the search results entirely.
Nobody can really afford to risk their website being banned from search engines. Google famously removed car manufacturer BMW from the search results after some black hat SEO practices were found on their website (See the BBC report)!
After some profuse apologising on behalf or BMW, they were allowed back in the search results provided they removed the offending content. So what sort of things might they of been doing?
Popular Black Hat Techniques
- Hidden Text - This refers to having any extra content on a page that is usually stuffed with keywords or phrases (see 'keyword stuffing' below) and purposefully hidden from sight of any visitors - but is visible to search engines. For example, if the text was white, against a white background, the visitor wouldn't necessarily be able to view it but a search engine would. This kind of practice is prohibited.
- Keyword Stuffing - Where a website has 'too many' keywords in the page content, in a short amount of space. For example, be very careful if you have paragraphs with more than three mentions of your targetted keyword(s) in, as a search engine may well suspect you of trying to "stuff" your page with keywords in an attempt to rank better.
- Cloaking - The various means of showing different content to search engines and visitors. Typically, ifa search engine visits the website then the content shown will be "over-optimised" and generated purely for the purpose of getting a page ranked higher in the search engines. This is bad, because search engines aim to give users the search results that they are after in the most relevant and natural means possible - so any manipulation in this way is frowned upon!
- Duplicate / Mini-sites - This used to be quite a popular method of bringing in business via search engines, but as search engines became more aware of it, it has quickly become a bannable offense. Be very careful when setting up new websites to advertise new products or services. Setting up more than one website per company isn't fair on the rest of the market or industry. This method is also commonly used for link farming (see below).
- Automated Submission / Link Builing - Using any software or other means of automatically submitting any content on the internet, in favour of your SEO, is another bad practise to avoid!
- Link Farming - This involves setting up multiple websites or attaining links in a 'un-natural' way. Whether or not you own any of the websites linking to you, setting up multiple websites all linking to eachother can look strangely suspicious to search engines. So be careful!
Be sure to stay away from anything that seems to undermine the nature of search engines. It isn't worth the risk... is it?!