Black Hat Search Engine Optimization – A guide on what not to do

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques can be categorized as white hat or black hat. White hat optimization is when approved techniques are used to enhance your website’s page rank, I have covered the basics of those in a previous post in this entry am going to focus on black hat or in more forwardly: what a professional Search Engine Optimizer or website admin should not do!

Rule 1: Do not use invisible or hidden content

Invisible Text is the practice of embedding textual content in your site that is not visible to users but instead is placed for the sole purpose of being crawled by search engines. This violates search engines guidelines not to display different content for spiders that a user would not see.

Rule 2: Don’t stuff your keywords

Keyword Stuffing is when you overload your keywords meta data tag with an excessive amounts of keywords that do not match content on your site. Keywords should be used for your pages but should not be abused.

Rule 3: Don’t Cloak

Cloaking is the practice of displaying different content to spiders then what a user would see. This is similar to Invisible Text but instead of some additional content this displays a completely different page that may not be related at all to the real one.

Rule 4: Doorway’s are bad

Doorway Pages are pages built specifically to obtain high page rankings and contain links to other sites that the creator really wants you to visit. These initially may increase your ranking but when found out your page ranking will be affected by being affiliated with the site.

Rule 5: Interlinking is just darn confusing

Interlinking or Link Farming is when a group of individuals come together and incorporate links to each others site with the purpose of increasing each others rankings and not providing relevant content.

Rule 6: Everyone one hates Spam

Spam comes in a multitude of forms including Comment Spam and Spam Pages. Like the name suggest comment spam is the creation of comment on other people’s websites with links to your own site with no relevance to the content of the page you are on. Spam Pages on the other hand are entire pages created with keyword embedded content that provides no real use and contain links to sites that they really want to drive traffic to.

In summary website optimization can be done correctly to realize long term gain or it can be done by violating search engine guidelines to realize short term gain but hurt you over the long term. Like everything else in life I find that real pride and satisfaction comes by doing things right and realizing long term results not just short term ones. If you are serious about your search engine optimization then don’t use black hat techniques.

// SEO //

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