Optimising a website through the use of black hat techniques is frowned upon by every search engine and most SEO consultants, including ourselves. Black hat refers to methods which are deceptive and fool search engines into believing a website is more credible than it actually is, and if caught, the punishment can be as severe as being struck off of Google.
But what are these black hat techniques? Well, they vary and here’s our list of the five more commonly used ones to be careful of…
Hidden Text
Webmasters create a webpage hiding large numbers of keywords in a text layer in front of the background and in the same colour so they cannot be identified by human readers.
Keyword Stuffing
Everybody knows the importance of using keywords to rank anywhere in Google and the volume which it is used in will generally help too. However, utilising keywords too often and repetitively in the content and Meta tags is something that will get websites penalised.
Cloaking
Search engine bots have difficulty ranking certain assets such as Flash animations, so cloaking was born in an attempt to avoid this. When a bot crawls a website, a script would display another version of the webpage, one that is search engine optimised and would perform better in the search engines.
Duplicate Content
This is when an article or piece of content is written (probably with a back link to the originating website) and then distributed on numerous websites, blogs and forums. Search engines are seeking original and unique content.
Spam Blogs
Back links are a fundamental means of increasing a websites ranking in search engines. One black hat method of increasing this is by creating a number of spam blogs (blogs created with the sole purpose of creating a back link to a website).
There are many other black hat methods that are used to promote a website, but these are amongst the most common. There is generally never a need to use such techniques as putting time into white-hat SEO methods (the opposite of black-hat) will pay dividends in the end.
