Learning More About Black Hat SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is one of the many internet marketing strategies used by many webmasters to promote their websites through the use of search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and many other search engines. Like many other forms of internet market techniques, such as SEM (search engine marketing), SEO also had its shares of successes in the market as well as with its questionable practices.

Much like any other forms of internet marketing, SEO has also been known for its many unorthodox methods and questionable techniques which many search engines, especially Google, have marked punishable and if caught employing such techniques could lead a website or set of websites to be banned from their indexes indefinitely. These techniques are usually known in the industry as the Black Hat SEO, synonymous from White Hat SEO.

Throughout the course of its use, several Black Hat SEO techniques have been formulated by many webmasters to either manipulate or fool search engines. According to many SEO Philippines consultants, much of its techniques are now ineffective yet it was known to have manipulated many search engines by its techniques while some are still used up to this day and many search engines are yet to think of a way to prevent such techniques.

Here are some of the techniques used in the past as well as today in Black Hat SEO which were known for their notoriety with manipulating search engine results:

Keyword Stuffing: This involves the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is useful to make a page appear to be relevant for a web crawler in a way that makes it more likely to be found. This technique however have lost its usefulness when search engines had the ability to analyze a page for keyword stuffing.
Meta Tag Stuffing: Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site's content. This tactic, however, has been ineffective since 2005.
Scraper sites: This is a website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. According to many SEO Philippines consultants, in the last few years scraper sites have proliferated at an amazing rate for spamming search engines.
Link Farms: One of the oldest forms of Black Hat SEO, this technique involves creating tightly-knit communities of pages referencing each other. Search engines countered the link farm movement by identifying specific attributes associated with link farm pages and filtering those pages from indexing and search results.
Spam in blogs: It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. According to many SEO Philippines consultants, any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.
Spam blogs: Also known as Splogs, this involves weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. Visit http://www.myoptimind.com for more info.