The Wrong Way of SEO

In the world of search engine optimization or SEO, SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques of which search engines do not approve. According to SEO Philippines commentators, they have classified these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing. So what are the things that an aspiring SEO consultant should know about Black Hat SEO?

SEO Techniques Classified As Black Hat SEO:

Content Based Black Hat SEO Techniques

* Keyword Stuffing
o 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. Older versions of indexing programs simply counted how often a keyword appeared, and used that to determine relevance levels. Most modern search engines have the ability to analyze a page for keyword stuffing and determine whether the frequency is consistent with other sites created specifically to attract search engine traffic. Also, large webpages are truncated, so that massive dictionary lists cannot be indexed on a single webpage.

* Hidden Texts
o Disguising keywords and phrases by making them the same color as the background, using a tiny font size, or hiding them within HTML code such as "no frame" sections, ALT attributes, zero-width/height DIVs, and "no script" sections. People screening websites for a search-engine company might temporarily or permanently block an entire website for having invisible text on some webpages.

* Meta Tag Stuffing
o Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site's content. Though it was the perfect black hat SEO technique, this tactic has been ineffective since 2005 according to SEO Philippines specialists.
Link Based Black Hat SEO Techniques

* Link Farms
o Involves creating tightly-knit communities of pages referencing each other, also known humorously as mutual admiration societies.
* Hidden Links
o Putting links where visitors will not see them in order to increase link popularity. Highlighted link text can help rank a webpage higher for matching that phrase.
* Sybil Attack
o This is the forging of multiple identities for malicious intent, named after the famous multiple personality disorder patient "Sybil". A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs known as spam blogs.
* Spam Blogs
o Spam blogs, also known as splogs, are fake blogs created solely for spamming. They are similar in nature to link farms and in conjunction with Sybil Attack.
* Cookie Stuffing
o This involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor's computer without their knowledge, which will then generate revenue for the person doing the cookie stuffing. This not only generates fraudulent affiliate sales, but also has the potential to overwrite other affiliates' cookies, essentially stealing their legitimately earned commissions.
Spamming

* Blog Spams
o This is the placing or solicitation of links randomly on other sites, placing a desired keyword into the hyperlinked text of the inbound link. Guest books, forums, blogs, and any site that accepts visitors' comments are particular targets and are often victims of drive-by spamming where automated software creates nonsense posts with links that are usually irrelevant and unwanted.
* Comment Spams
o According to SEO Philippines specialists, comment spam is a form of link spam that has arisen in web pages that allow dynamic user editing such as wikis, blogs, and guestbooks. It can be problematic because agents can be written that automatically randomly select a user edited web page, such as a Wikipedia article, and add spamming links.
* Wiki Spams
o Using the open editability of wiki systems to place links from the wiki site to the spam site. The subject of the spam site is often unrelated to the wiki page where the link is added. In early 2005, Wikipedia implemented a default 'nofollow' value for the 'rel' HTML attribute. Links with this attribute are ignored by Google's PageRank algorithm. Forum and Wiki admins can use these to discourage Wiki spam.
Other Types of Black Hat SEO Techniques

* Mirror Websites
o Hosting of multiple websites all with conceptually similar content but using different URLs. Some search engines give a higher rank to results where the keyword searched for appears in the URL.
* URL Redirection
o Taking the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh tags, Flash, JavaScript, Java or Server side redirects.
* Cloaking
o Cloaking refers to any of several means to serve a page to the search-engine spider that is different from that seen by human users. It can be an attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a particular web site. Another form of cloaking is code swapping, i.e., optimizing a page for top ranking and then swapping another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.

Margarette Mcbride is a copywriter of Optimind Web Design and SEO, a web design and seo company in the Philippines. Optimind specializes in building and promoting websites that are designed for conversion..