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Don't Let Black Bart do Your Optimization - Black Hat SEO

Black Bart was a gentleman stage coach robber. Legend has it he never fired a shot during any of his robberies and never robbed a passenger. Nonetheless, he did break the rules, not to mention the law, and Wells Fargo was not thrilled with his activities. "What does this have to do with search engine optimization"? you might ask. Very little. But I think Black Bart wore a black or very darkly colored hat.

If you hire a search engine optimization company to optimize your website for better search engine rankings make sure no one there is wearing a black hat or engaging in Black Hat SEO. Using optimization techniques that are against the rules and are "outlawed" by the search engine can get your site banned. The reason behind the desire on the part of the search engine engineers to inhibit website owners and optimizers from using various techniques comes down to a desire to serve up the best possible and most relevant sites to the user based on the user's request. Black hat techniques are only a desire to trick or cheat the search engines, other website owners and the user. A good optimizer has no need to use them.

Here are some Black Hat techniques to avoid and to make sure your SEO company also avoids. In fact, if they even suggest doing one or more of these things fire them immediately. If someone is willing to engage in any black hat SEO they may be doing things that only other optimization experts or web developers could recognize.

Black Hat SEO Tactics to Avoid:

Cloaking: To cover or conceal something as if with a cloak. The search engines spiders or web crawlers are continuously going through the web and grabbing page content to be analyzed and indexed later. Showing one page of content to your human visitors and another to the web spider or crawler is called cloaking because you are covering the real content with fake content designed only to trick the search engines into giving that page a higher ranking that it would deserve based on the content it provides. Google, Yahoo and other search engines hate this.

Hiding Keywords / Invisible Text: Placing text on a website that is in the identical or near identical color as the background making it virtually invisible to human visitors but 'visible' to the search engine spiders in frowned upon by Google, Yahoo et al for obvious reasons. This has been used in the past to repeat keywords numerous times in a way that would make you just appear stupid or crazy to human visitors but could increase the apparent relevance of your page to the search engine spider and indexing program. All the search engines are onto this. Don't even try to make the colors unreasonably close such as very dark gray on a black background. The technique is old, overused and obvious. Don't try it. You'll get caught.

Keyword Stuffing:

Repeating a keyword or search phrase over and over again on a page in an unnatural fashion just to raise your site's ranking for that term does not produce quality content. It also does not really help to improve your ranking. The practice of keyword stuffing is one of the Black Hat tactics that led to external linking becoming such an important factor in search engine results rankings. These external links are far more difficult to control than such things as keyword stuffing, cloaking, etc.

Spam:

This is a general category and includes basically technique not condoned by the search engines or explicitly forbidden. Worthless pages with no content created just for the purpose of ranking well in the search engines are spam pages. These can be a list of links to other sites or a bunch of affiliate and/or Adsense links.

Link Farms:

Although a website cannot get penalized for links pointing to the site it is better to stay away from link farms they do nothing for your rankings. What actually can hurt your rankings is linking from your web site to a link farm. This can even get your site banned. Another name for a link farm is a free-for-all site.