Black Hat SEO: What You Shouldn't Do

There are two type of search engine optimisation. White Hat SEO where you follow the guidelines of the search engines, keep the end user in mind all throughout your optimisation process and put a lot of focus on relevancy to keep. Then there's Black Hat SEO which is, in effect, the complete opposite. This will give you a guide on what tactics to avoid and what ones you need to be careful of, important if you have someone else performing your web development and search engine optimisation.

Invisible Text Search engine robots work by scanning the entire page and its contents, picking out words and phrases that match those that the user is searching for. A black hat technique that has proven popular is to use invisible text. Normally, this is text that matches the colour of the page, such as white text on a white background or blue on a blue background. This can be read by the search robots and they might stick more of relevance because of a greater text density. Avoid this tactic at all costs, as it's a technique that is linked with spamming.

Keyword Stuffing This is another popular method of getting better rankings in the search index. To put it simply, it's simply stuffing your pages with keywords and phrases. As this doesn't put any focus on the quality of the content and is blatantly obvious as to only wanting high rankings, you might find you site banned from search results extremely quickly.

Cloaking As a Google robot will want to search through all your pages for relevancy, this is a technique that Google despises more than most. Cloaking means that you reserve one page for the search robots and show the visitors a completely different one purely to get traffic to your site.

Doorway Pages These are essentially links that users will never see. They are used purely to increase the rankings on the search engines but have no real content of their own. This was actually something that was popular with some SEO firms but search engine companies have cracked down considerably on the use of doorway pages, as they defeat the purpose of relevant content.

Spam These are just useless pages with no content whatsoever, maybe just ads leading to irrelevant, individual websites. These will normally be created by webmasters who want to earn money through advertising.

It's important to know these common techniques to ensure that whoever you have performing your SEO or creating your website are not using any of them. The result is that search engines will immediately ban you from their rankings and in the case of Google, it's extremely difficult to get your listing back.