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	What is Black Hat SEO? Posted 13 May 2009

How did Black Hat SEO come about?

When organisations are looking to improve their website's search engine rankings through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), like any other marketing service, they like to see results quickly. However, SEO isn't instant like a form of advertising. It's a process, therefore taking considerable time and dedication. It also requires constant work, so shouldn't be looked upon as a one-off project.

Naturally, with suppliers eager to satisfy impatient clients, shortcuts were searched for to boost search engine rankings quickly. These shortcuts focused on manipulation techniques that might be good for the website (in the short term), but resulted in a bad user experience.

What makes Black Hat SEO wrong?

The key to building and optimising a website for Google is to get out of the mindset of trying to learn all of the 'tricks' and think more about what a user would want. Your website's content should be useful and relevant for the user at all times. After all, why have a high ranking website when it can't convert visitors into actual sales?

Black Hat SEO on the other hand, doesn't consider user preference, with tricks such as stuffing pages with lots of keywords, or creating duplicate websites just for the sake of more backlinks are things that Google clamps down on, and will result in penalisation.

Typical Black Hat SEO techniques are:

	Hidden Text and Links Commonly used, this is where text is set as the colour as the page background, rending it useless to the user. It used to work, but now this picked up easily by search engines.
	Duplicate Websites This is where websites with virtually identical content are created as a lazy way of getting backlinks to the main website. Duplicate content is picked up by search engines, so it is a fairly pointless task.
	Keyword Stuffing Building keywords into content, but now if you do it so regularly it renders the text almost unreadable! This may include making all of the keywords bold.
	Image Alt Tag Stuffing By creating tiny images, you can then put alternative text behind them which gives a description to search engine robots. Black Hat SEOers will use this as a way of cramming in lots of keywords.
	Doorway or Cloaked Pages These are pages that will look different to a search engine and a user, in attempt to avoid looking 'spammy.' but attempts to trick search engines into indexing the website higher.
	Hidden Forms Another way of hiding text is by using hidden form tags. They can't be read by us, but search engines pick up the text in the HTML code. Another technique which has been clamped on now.
	Small Text Again, totally useless to a user, very small text is picked up normally by a search engine. However, search engines can see judge too small text as spam.
	Link Farms These are groups of websites that all link to each other in order to improve Page Rank. These are often not relevant links, and as as their is no genuine content, the links are deemed worthless by search engines.

Google has three sets of Guidelines that are there to ensure webmasters follow the rules, and therefore don't fall prey to any kind of penalisation which can be very detrimental. Seeing as Google is by far the most important search engine, their Guidelines are worth listening to!

To take a look all of the Google Webmaster Guidelines, visit the dedicated page.

Why should I listen to the Quality Guidelines?

Many websites get away with Black Hat SEO techniques and perhaps rightfully, if they are gaining success, you will feel they are gaining an unfair advantage. It is important to remember that Google will not be outwitted forever, and especially so now people can report abuse through the Google Webmasters system.

The reporting facility should be an added incentive to optimise the right way too, seeing as if you can report others, they can report you too!

Just remember, Google is a huge company with amazing resources. No methods will go unnoticed forever. If you need short term results, there is always Pay Per Click advertising.

I've been penalised, what can I do?

First, of all, you may not have been. Obtaining a good ranking, when done right, can take a while. You should be optimising your website is a natural way by following the Quality Guidelines. Generate useful content, design your website well and make it easy to navigate. Getting a load of links from directories is not the basis of SEO, so if you're not sure on what you should be doing familiarise yourself with the Ultimate SEO Guide!

If you have a new website based on a fairly new domain name, you also may have been held back by the sandbox effect.

If you still think you've been genuinely penalised, it should be obvious that the first thing to do is to sort these issues first! In some cases, your website may have been hacked which caused the original penalisation, so ensure web server security is enhanced to ensure it won't happen again.

In order to request reconsideration you'll need to sign up to Google Webmasters, then you can use the reconsideration tool.

You may also be interested in reading....
 

	What is White Hat SEO?
	SEO Basics: Google's Quality Guidelines
	Beware of Duplicate Content

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