Top 5 Worst Black Hat SEO Techniques
So, you want to rank on the first page of Google for a handful of targeted keyword terms. That’s great – so do about 13 gazillion other small businesses in the world. Not to worry, you say, you have a plan… a wonderfully terrible plan that includes a wide selection of black hat optimization techniques. News Flash friends – attempting to cheat at search engine optimization will get you no where. In fact, it’s the fastest way to get your website blacklisted from search engines everywhere. If you’re ready to start building optimization ideas into your small business website, here are five techniques you should definitely avoid.
Five Extremely Bad Search Engine Optimization Ideas
1) Stuffing Keywords into Invisible Text
Yes, people still do this. This includes text written in the same colour as the background, or text that is hidden behind the main area of a website via creative CSS designs. Search engines will find this and tag you as a spammer.
2) Purchasing Follow Links
Link building is, by far, my least favourite part of search engine optimization. Of course, it’s also one of the most important. So when you’re presented with the opportunity to cut corners and purchase follow links from another website, resist! Companies that sell banner ads or text links on a website must tag these links as no-follow in order to abide by search engine best practices.
3) Participating in Reciprocal Link Exchanges
In a perfect world, hyperlinks back to your company website should act as an endorsement for your site. These endorsements should be 100% natural and completely without benefit for the website that has created the link. When you link to a company in exchange for a link back to your homepage (commonly referred to as reciprocal linking) you’re breaking the law of unbiased linking. With that being said, not all reciprocal links are the kiss of death. Swapping links with a site that is highly relevant to your business can be a good thing as it helps build relevance with your online visitors. Of course, having a highly relevant site link to you without a reciprocal link agreement is always more beneficial.
4) Keep the Cloak Off
This is the practice of showing one version of content to a search engine spider, and a completely different version to your human visitors. Lying to a search engine is like lying to your mother – a sin punishable by drastic measures. When a search engine suspects a site of cloaking, there’s an excellent chance that the site will be banned for an extended period of time.
5) Doorway Pages
If you’re presented with a doorway page, always, always walk the other way. Doorway pages are simple HTML pages that are created with the sole purpose of ranking for a specific search term in a specific search engine. The doorway page is normally designed with a quick redirect or refresh that presents the human viewer with a completely different page of content. The purpose of a doorway page is to trick the search engine into giving higher rankings to a spam-filled page. Doorway pages just create useless clutter in search engine results, so save us all the hassle and stick to ethical optimizing.
My point: Don’t waste your time trying to figure out how to trick the search engines. Even if you do succeed and make your way to the front page of Google, it’s only a matter of time before the search engine police track you down and send your site into exile. It just makes sense to take that same energy and invest it into great content development and ethical online marketing practices.
What black hat seo techniques bother you the most? Leave a comment and let us know.
6 thoughts on “Top 5 Worst Black Hat SEO Techniques”
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SEO tactics that should be, or better yet, definitely be avoided. Some people still think that these methods work and that search engines have no way of “finding them”. Up to today, I still receive many emails proposing me to do “link exchange” and it has come to the point that I no longer reply to them. Before I would take the time and explain why its no longer beneficial, but now, I just delete them. Go figure
All good advice, but in reference to point 2 – in very competitive search markets, like general shopping or discount areas, look at the top 10 ranking pages, look at the links to their site and every single one will have paid for followed links. It is impossible, in some areas, to rank without them – and because everyone does it in that market, no one gets penalised.
I wouldn’t say that everyone is getting away with it Michael… Check out this video from Brad Gosse. He was vaporized from Google for exactly a year for buying links: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF1dfKWYG_U
I disagree with you on doorway pages. It depends on the door. Yes I know what you’re talking about with the spam and everything and those are despicable. But there are several times a doorway “enter here” type page makes sense. For instance, I have a website http://www.thesearemykeywords.com that I spend all my time making the best site I can for google and everyone. I promote the site with that url but in some contexts its easier to remember http://www.NotAKeywordButCatchy.com and I give that out instead. I have a doorway page on that site, whose only purpose is to link to the main site where people will go to find the information. So I pay for two domains. One for google and the majority of my customers and one for people with short term memory loss. I don’t think it’s skeezy.
I agree with you on all points to some extent. The only one I have a beef with you on is purchasing followed links. If you want a shortcut to not have to do the copious amount of linkbuilding that you have pointed out as being really boring, then one way around that is to purchase links. You should not purchase them from known link sellers though. The key is to find places to get them, barter for them or just offer to buy one here and there.
If you buy them from link farms you are almost sure to get caught eventually. Even then you might make a ton of money between now and then.
Integrity is everything. The search engines really perform a wonderful service for the Internet by striving to deliver quality content (information) to their customers thus encouraging the creation and collection of great content. I’m on board for doing it right and making the world (and the Internet) a better place!!