subject: Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Techniques [print this page] Black hat techniques are those SEO techniques that help you to increase your search engine ranking very fast and these techniques are always hated by the search engines. There are many black hat SEO techniques that web masters follow still. Some of the common ones are:
Few years back Meta keyword was one the main factor to get high rankings, but now search engines refuses them to gain high ranks in search engine result page. At present the web masters are trying to stuff lot of keywords both on page and in the Meta keywords to get better ranking. But this is called as keyword stuffing a black hat SEO technique.
When the search engine looks at the site they see that the content is relevant to the given keyword for what they are looking for. Keeping this in mind the webmasters over use the keywords in the page and try to boost the page rank of the site. But using this technique can drop the existing rankings of the site.
Hidden text is another black hat SEO technique that was even bigger than keyword stuffing years ago. It can also be liked with keyword stuffing. Since the site visitors do not want to see the over use of keywords in the site the web masters put the keywords as a hidden text in the pages making them invisible for the users but the search engines can see them. This technique is used to trick both the site visitors and the search engines.
The texts are made hidden either making the font color to the same color as the background or by making the font size to 0. Hidden text can be usually seen at the bottom of the pages with white background. But the hidden text can be easily seen in the page source and now-a-days the search engines are easily able to identify the hidden text.
The other kind of black hat SEO technique is link farms. Link farm is nothing but just websites which contains more links with no information on them. These link farms are used to boost the page ranks.
With reciprocal link exchange linking to bad sites will always affect your site rankings. Bad site here can be said that those sites which perform the actions that is not liked by the search engines. If you link to them then the search engines may think that you might also involved with them.
The most common black hat SEO technique is cloaking where from one is shown to the search engine and a different page is shown to the visitors. This technique is used for the keyword that would not normally rank in the search engines.
The other commonly seen black hat SEO technique is content scrapping where people will not write contents for their websites, they just visit other people site take the content from those sites mash them up and upload them to their site. This leads to duplicate content issue and the website will find all the difficulties to rank.
So it is the duty of the website owner to make sure that all these black hat SEO techniques are not used in the site and verify that he webmasters follow the search engine guidelines.
