Black hat SEO techniques

SEO practices that are considered unethical by the search engines are know within the SEO industry as 'Black Hat'. These methods are used to gain quick high position ranking which are unsustainable by manipulation of the search engines and the technology they use in an attempt to gain an unfair advantage over their competitors.

The search engines take a harsh view on such practices and when a deception is detected website's are either penalised or completely banned from the search engine index. The banning of website's are very rare, most webmasters who suspect they have been banned are actually still held in the index and have been penalised to the extent that their web page is ranked very low. Black Hat practices include :-

Hidden text or links

The use of coloured text on a similar background, the search engine views the text but the viewer can not see it due to lack of contrast, search engines do detect hidden text.

Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing or stacking is the process of repeating keywords and phrases into a web page in order to artificially boost the keyword density. The search engines seek content rich web pages, not paragraphs of repeated keywords or phrases, again these techniques are easily identified during the index operation.

Cloaking

Displaying one content to Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK and completely different content to viewer is a practice employed known as cloaking.

Spam

Spam within SEO is the generation of web pages of no worth or content and therefore no benefit to the end user.

Doorways

Doorways are the use of highly ranked web pages to attract traffic which is usually re-directed on to its intended web page, this technique is commonly used in conjunction with cloaking.

Multiple pages

Multiple pages of the same content are used in an attempt to rank high for particular keyword or phrase.