What is Black Hat SEO

Probably many of you already have heard a term Black Hat SEO. But I think only a few know what this term means. Opencircle blog has published great review of all Black Hat SEO tips & tricks. Worth to read.

There are a couple of methods regarding Black Hat SEO and you can find information below regarding a couple of them with a brief description on the Black Hat SEO method.

Keyword Stuffing
It is by repeating keywords on your page in a un user friendly way usually hidden from the viewer.  It is an attempt to manipulate your page ranking and search engines takes note of this.

Invisible Text
Exactly as the heading suggests “invisible text”.  Example:  using a white background with white text.  Once more the user can’t see the text because it is hidden and it is focused on search engine bots and crawlers

Cloaking
Search engines knows what is on your website as their spiders crawl your pages periodically and adds them to their index. Cloaking means showing a page to the search engine crawlers and a completely different one to the users browsing the site.

Doorway Pages
A doorway page is a web page built specifically with the intention of ranking well in the search engines without any real valuable  content of its own.  Doorway pages usually links to the real destination page with valuable content or redirects there.

Selling Page Rank
Selling of text links to advertisers/web masters on a high page rank page that passes the page rank value onto their website.

Buying Expired Domains
There are link spammers that monitors (must be boring) DNS records for domains that will expire soon or that has recently expired.  The link spammers then buys the domain and replaces the content and links with their own.  Most search engines resets the link data on expired domains.

Link Spamming
Link spamming similar to link farming (see next heading). Link spamming takes advantage of link based ranking algorithms, such as Google’s Page Rank (PR) algorithm.  It gives and passes a higher page rank (PR) to a website the more other highly (PR) ranked websites links to it.

Link Farming
I wrote an article a while back on why link farming is a bad SEO practice.  It involves the linking to websites that are not relevant for the purpose to increase the websites link popularity and PR (page rank) value.

Spam Blogs
Spam blogs better known as “splogs” are similar to link farming.  Spam blogs are fake blogs created only for spamming.

Page Hijacking
Page hijacking is achieved by creating a copy of a website which shows the content similar to the original content of the hijacked website to a web crawler but redirects the user to unrelated websites.

Mirror Websites
Mirror websites is the hosting of multiple web sites all with similar content but using different URLs containing keywords in the URL.  Most popular search engines gives a higher page rank (PR) to pages where the specific keyword searched for appears in the websites URL.

URL Redirection etc.
The URL Redirection method is used by taking the website viewer to a different page without their intervention.  For example using META refresh tags, javascript or another server side method.

via http://blog.opencircle.co.za/search-engine-optimization/what-is-black-hat-seo/

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