Black Hat Search Engine Optimization: Stay Away From These Taboo Practices

Because of the importance of getting a high ranking in search engines, a number of cheats have emerged. Here are a few common methods that some marketers use to get higher ranking in search engines. I do not approve of or support these practices but believe you should be aware of all options available. Many see search engine optimization as an exercise in risk management – if you are competing for highly sought after words and have achieved a great ranking, these are ways to protect that ranking from copycat competitors. However, you should note that most search engines frown upon these practices and if you are caught, your site can be banned from search results.

Link Farms
If you’ve ever received an email offering to submit your site to thousands of directories and search engines for a small fee, chances are you are being solicited by a link farm. Link farming (also called free for all farms or FFA) is the process of exchanging reciprocal links with other websites, even ones that have nothing to do with your site’s content, in hopes of achieving a higher rank in search engines. Link farms started because most search engines use external search factors like how many other websites link to yours to determine your page rank. In theory, the more sites that link to yours, the more popular search engines will think your site is. Not surprisingly, Google and other search engines caught on quickly and have started banning sites that participate in link farms.

Cloaking
Cloaking is the process of delivering one version of a page to a user and a different version of that page to a search engine. The purpose of cloaking in SEO is to deliver a highly optimized page to spiders while humans get a normal page. The argument against cloaking is that it is unethical – in essence you are lying about the content of your website to get a better rank: one that your page doesn’t deserve. On the flip side, those that practice cloaking techniques argue that cloaked pages provide relevant, optimized pages to search engines. Visitors coming from search engines do receive relevant content – but the pages are written for them, not optimized for search engines. Others see cloaking as a way to protect your marketing investment – you’ve spent a lot of time and money optimizing your website. Why make it public for others to steal the content? Regardless of your views, just about all search engines view cloaking as negative and have issued warnings that if they catch you, they may penalize or even ban your site from search results.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are simplistic pages with few graphics and lots of text designed solely to achieve a high ranking in search engines. Often their text consists of a repeated string of keywords and phrases or pseudo-text with keywords and phrases inserted throughout. Once a visitor clicks on the doorway page, it then redirects them further into the website.

Hidden Text/Links
Hidden text is a long block of keywords that are the same color as your page background. Similarly, hidden links are 1 pixel gifs linked to other pages. Both were designed to trick search engines into thinking you had more relevant content or links and to give you a higher page ranking. To detect this practice, crawlers can now match the text color with the background color. Nearly all major search engines publicly denounce hidden text and cite it as grounds for removal.

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