What is Black Hat SEO?
The term black hat SEO (also known as spamdexing or search spam or search engine spam) refers to using deceptive or unethical techniques that do not follow the search engine guidelines, in order to get high rankings in search engines. The following methods are generally adopted for black hat SEO purposes.
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Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid
- Hidden Text - Adding unwanted text and making it invisible by setting the same color and background, using tiny fonts, hiding through CSS code such as using "display: none" or putting it in "no script" or "no frame" sections etc.
- Keyword Stuffing - Addition of keywords on calculated places within the body of the page to increase its keyword density, frequency and diversity. This is useful to make a page appear to be more relevant to a web spider for those specific keywords.
- Meta Tag Stuffing - Adding repeated keywords in the meta tags just for the intention of raising its relevancy.
- Doorway Pages - These are generally irrelevant, low in quality, non informative or as to say "fake" pages that are only designed to attract web spiders. A doorway page will generally have "click here to enter" on the page.
- URL Redirection - Taking the visitor to another site without their intention or knowledge. e.g. using JavaScript, server side redirection or HTML redirection using Meta Refresh tags.
- Link Farms- A group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group.
- Cloaking- It means to serve different contents of a web page to the search-engine spider and to the human visitors.
- Mirror Websites- Hosting multiple websites with almost similar contents but different urls.
One thing to keep in mind that these black hat SEO techniques and tricks may work in most of the cases, but temporarily. These are not worth enough to take the risk. For long terms gain and getting permanent stable position in search engine results, all or everything that seems like black hat SEO should be avoided.