At the other end of the Monochrome SEO spectrum is the Black Hat SEO. Black Hat SEO is the practice of using search engine optimization techniques that disobey the terms of service of the popular search engines. Black Hat SEO uses the term “black hat” which is taken from the old western movies which show bad guys as wearing black hats.
Advantages of Black Hat SEO
There are no advantages going to be mentioned here. These techniques are against the search engine’s terms of service and will no doubt do more harm than good for your site. And that goes double for your readers, who will have to go through all that spam, hidden content, keyword-stuffed articles when they visit Black Hat SEO sites.
Black Hat SEO Techniques
What you will find here however, is a list that shows a couple of Black Hat SEO techniques. Techniques that you should not utilize.
- Keyword stuffing and keyword stacking
White Hat uses proper SEO and uses the right number of keywords, Gray Hat SEO uses a little bit more but doesn’t go over the top. Black Hat SEO on the other hand, stuffs articles with keywords, so much so, that it doesn’t read good at all anymore.
Another way that Black Hat SEO misuses keywords is using irrelevant keywords in the content to get a couple more hits. For example using the keyword Lebron James into your dog collar article is using an irrelevant keyword in your article. Like placed ads in a Michael Bay movie, irrelevant keywords will stand out.
- Hidden text and Hidden links
There are a couple of ways that site’s can hide texts from readers. One very basic example is the text are hidden from the reader by changing the color of the hidden font to match the background. Hidden font may contain tons of keywords and some little content. This technique is used to get more keywords in the site for search engine’s to notice. They are not pretty relevant to the reader though.
- Doorway or Gateway Pages
Doorway pages are pages of a site that lures in search engines, thus luring in visitors, and then redirecting the visitors almost instantly to bring them to an unrelated site. It’s sort of like a trap for visitors. They are baited with different content and then forced to a site that has some other content. Sometimes used by pornographic sites to get readers into their sites.
- Link Farming
Link farms are called such because they have no other use than to link tons of unrelated websites. These are used to get more visibility from SERPs. However, with the Penguin updates that come from Google, those sites that use link farms to get their links will be in for a panealty.
Black Hat SEO does not benefit the readers and the visitors to a site. High value sites make sure that readers have a good experience when they visit, but those that practice Black Hat SEO don’t really care much for that. Pretty much like the bad guys in the western movies of old. Don’t be one of the bad guys, go with White Hat SEO.