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The Controversy behind Black Hat SEO – How far would YOU go?
The debate on spamdexing is never ending! I’ve designed a site and want it to get the attention it deserves. Or the profits I deserve! There are limits to making a site user friendly! On the contrary, there are no limits to the number of times your sites’ listing may get appended in search engine results, just because some other sites were using deliberate methods to manipulate search engine results.
It’s frustrating to see yourself on the 3rd page of Google’s results with virtually no hits in sight. This is when my mind tells me that it’s the search engines headache to set the parameters for acceptable optimisation. This is when that dark Black Hat starts to appear grey!
My Single Point Agenda
The purpose of a commercial website is to make money. Money is made on the first page of search engine results and the downfall of profits from the site listed #1 to the one listed #10 is exponential. I want to use techniques that will get me profit.
Use Black Hat SEO techniques? Trick Google and Yahoo into thinking that my Hat is the brightest white, even if it’s for some time?
A typical search engine would list almost all websites for a given keyword but are not obliged to list any of them. Neither are we obliged to follow all the vague guidelines, a search engine frames. After all we haven’t signed a contract with them.
Let’s take the following citation into consideration:
Yahoo is continuously banning “pages that do not provide good user experience”. This is quite anarchic on the part of Yahoo! This is too wide, a perspective! This means that I hire a web design team to make my site as good looking and user friendly as possible and Yahoo! decides whether it’s good enough or not.
SEO for Commercial Websites
Purely commercial sites do not have elaborate content. They just want to sell their products and services. Online markets are competitive and these sites have to use aggressive SEO methods to rank well. Bait and switch techniques are two examples of Black Hat SEO that some sites still get away with.
To tell you the truth, there is no dearth of Black hatters who continuously devise new ways to manipulate search engine algorithms.
For some commercial websites, SEO is not the only thing that matters. Conversions are of utmost importance. The art of hooking up a visitor and making him come back for more in the hope of translating his visits into sales is not perfected by all.
What Constitutes Black hat SEO
Here are some practices that are considered Black hat SEO by MSN, Google and Yahoo!
This one is for the people who are continuously thinking of bending the rules! Or breaking them!
- Anchor text, keyword or domain name stuffing.
- Employing the use of links and hidden texts.
- Do not try to step up the number of incoming links to your page. Techniques such as link farms and are well monitored by all search engines.
- Excessive cross linking of sites to increase your popularity.
- Cloaking, i.e. delivering web pages to a search engine that are different from the real ones.
- Using Gateway Pages. These are optimised for different keywords but do not have any worthwhile content in them.
- Using content that is of no value to the user. This is also called auto-generated content which either targets relevant keywords or creates unnecessary inbound links.
- Spamming blogs and web forums.
- Link Hoarding.
The use of all these tactics and many more will get your website banned from search engine indices.
Most of the above mentioned technique do not need special attention by search engines. They can be automatically detected.
Do take a look at the Yahoo!, Google and MSNs’ Search Engine Optimization Guidelines.
09.20.22 at 9:20 am |
Nice blog.. Good content.. I liked it much….
18.09.04 at 6:09 pm |
Good article on black hat techniques. Does anybody actually know someone who has had a website banned for using black hat seo techniques? I’ve never actually come across anyone who has, is it just scaremongering by the search companies?