The Top 10 Components Of A Black Hat SEO Campaign
Black hat SEO techniques might gain you top search engine rankings, but they’ll certainly ruin your business model. These methods of ‘cheating’ go against search engine regulations and are very likely to get you banned from the search engines for good. They’re also unethical and can generally annoy web users, ruining your reputation.
So, you can kiss goodbye to a long-term successful business if you employ any of the tactics below:
1. Buying links
Having more one-way inbound links to your website can result in improved SEO. However, be careful, as search engines are becoming more intelligent at working our which links are legit and which have been paid for.
2. Spammed landing pages
A website which has different landing pages geared towards targeted keywords is spamming. A website should have one main landing page, but can have numerous entry pages. Spammed landing pages will be overcrowded with keywords in order to be spidered by search engines.
3. Cyber hoax
When a user creates a website to look convincingly like a legitimate news website to create a publicity buzz; he is creating a cyber hoax. Basically, creating a made-up news story and submitting the story to social websites such as stumble upon and digg.
4. Keyword spamming
You might think that overcrowding your website with as many keywords as possible will result in good SEO. However, search engines are more switched on than ever to spot keyword spamming.
5. Cloaking
Basically; showing two different pages of your website; one to the search engines and a different (possibly sales page) to web users. Search engines, in theory, see your optimised website and give it high rankings, users then see your sales page.
6. XSS Injection
Cross-site scripting uses a flaw in some servers HTTP GET QUERY_STRING which allows text to be ‘injected’ into a website, including links. Search engines can then be forced to visit the injected pages to benefit from page rank etc.
7. Page Rank Hijacking
This technique involves redirecting a high page rank website to a less popular website with a 302 redirect, also known as fake page ranking. This is a sneaky technique that can be used to sell domains for a higher value than they’re worth.
8. Scrapping and spinning
Scrapping and spinning involves spidering other websites for content, jumbling up the content to make it unique and then creating new content to save time. This is a dirty technique that’s often used for AdSense websites.
9. Splogs
Scrapping and spinning blogs are built to look just like regular blogs, but their content isn’t personal. It’s taken from other websites; the content is mixed up a bit, and then used to create ‘unique’ content that can be very hard to read.
10. Link spamming
Link spamming involves having too many links with the same anchor text pointing to your website. Although there are times when links such as these may be legitimate, if the links have appeared almost overnight; search engines will class it as link spamming.
It’s all too easy to be tempted by black hat techniques, but if you want your website to stick around and do you some good, ignore the techniques above, and ask us about our white hat / ethical SEO services.
Matt Chatterley
A nice list of techniques to look out for and avoid – the damage which these (and others) can cause is substantial. And as you imply in the intro, even if they DO bring in more hits – those hits are unlikely to present a good conversion ratio (unlikely to sell anything / meet your goals) – so getting a good ROI from spam-tastic SEO is pretty damn hard in most arenas!
Posted 3-4-2010