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Black hat SEO is unethical and risky

June 6, 2008

There are two types of search engine optimiser – White Hats and Black Hats. The White Hats follow legitimate best practices to achieve high rankings based on the credibility and merit of the website. Black Hats pursue seamier tactics to try and fool the search engines into awarding high rankings. These tactics may produce some limited success but will more likely result in the website being (sometimes severely) penalised. The search engines employ very sophisticated mechanisms for detecting such practices. Do not be tempted to try any of the following, stick to ethical SEO.

Keyword stuffing

The overuse and misuse of keywords by placing them in alt, meta, noscript, noframes, comment, etc. tags.

Invisible / hidden text

Making text the same colour as the background or so faint or small that the human eye can barely see it or positioning it off the visible page. The search engines can allegedly even detect when this is being done via CSS. But there may be a legitimate reason for hiding text via CSS. For example, using images for font substitution but keeping the text ’somewhere‘ for screen-readers or if images are turned off (a very common practice – I do it on this website). So to what extent are such tactics actually penalised? It’s the subject of much debate.

Doorway pages

Pages that contain nothing other than certain keywords and link to one of the main pages on the website.

Redirect pages

Similar to doorway pages in concept, except they redirect straight to another page on the website without displaying. This is usually achieved using Javascript or meta redirects. To genuinely redirect a redundant page, use a 301 Redirect external link .

Cloaking

The delivery of optimised conetnt to the search engine spiders and different content to the human visitors.

Artificial linking

Obtaining links from irrelevant sources purely to increase link popularity. Or creating artificial mini networks of cross-linking.

Duplicate content

Repeating content on multiple pages with no other intention than to over-optimise keywords. There are many legitimate reasons for duplicate content but, wherever possible, counter the risk of false penalisation by using techniques such as robots.txt or 301 Redirects to steer the spiders away.

Filed in: Search Engine Optimisation