Black Hat SEO may produce results. But, it’s unethical. And what’s more, it’s directed towards short-term gain but could lead to severe losses in the long run.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is the use of unfair techniques to promote a site on search engine listing. These techniques may work but the results are likely to be temporary. These sites are often banned if the search engines get wind of these unethical practices.

What are the common Black Hat techniques?

Keyword Stuffing: Overburdening a site with too many keywords at the most unwarranted places is a common black hat technique. Eventually, search engines might ban sites that do this.

Invisible Text: Another method is putting lists of keywords in white text on a white background in order feed different on-page content to search engines and different to users actually browsing the site. It is easy for search engines to detect this.

Doorway or Gateway Pages: Some web developers use the doorway page – a fake page that the user will never see and which would be only visible to search engine spiders. These doorway pages are optimized heavily for search engines and normal users never see it as they are automatically redirected to a different page (you can do that based on user-agent check). It can be easily detected by search engines.

There are several others like:

Comment Spam

Black hat link building techniques

Black Hat techniques applied to PPC

Why is Black Hat unfair?

Black hat practices are unfair mainly because these techniques do not follow the rules and regulations of search engines. Black hat presents content unethically to search engine spiders and users. This in turn leads to a poor user experience.

What are the consequences for using Black Hat techniques?

Keep in mind the fact that there are no particular guidelines that define the term Black hat. So, what is considered black hat by one webmaster or search engine may be considered acceptable by another search engine or webmaster. There are different schools of thought on what is considered Black hat. The Property Rights Approach says that anything you do to your property, i.e., your website is not black hat. While the Visitor Value Approach endorses any form of promotion as long as it does not affect the user experience. The Unnatural Rankings Approach believes that if a site is ranked unnaturally high for its keywords, it’s back hat. But the consequences are almost the same no matter what the approach. The sites are either temporarily or permanently banned by search engines when found using black hat techniques.

Where can I find search engine policies?

Google: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

Yahoo Web Search: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html

MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

Black hat sure is enticing. But the negative long-term consequences far out weigh the short-term gains that you might enjoy when you use this questionable technique of search engine optimization.

Rand Fishkin talks about the differences between being white hat or crossing the tracks to the dark side of Spammerville.

There are several other techniques which are on the border of black hat and white hat and it is very difficult for individuals to know about all of them. You need a professional company to take care of your search engine marketing.

We at Empowered SEO strictly follow white-hat techniques and can help provide professional SEO services for your needs.

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