Understanding Black Hat SEO

When most people come across the term black hat SEO, what comes to mind is something mysterious, illegal or maybe even dangerous. Well, black hat SEO is not really mysterious neither is it dangerous – but it sure is illegal as far as search engines are concerned. Black hat SEO refers to the use of unorthodox and unacceptable methods to shore up a website’s Page Rank. For all practical purposes, black hat SEO has all the hallmarks of a forbidden fruit – it may look, feel and taste exciting but once you get caught, the consequences can be disastrous.

 In the cut throat competition for web traffic and thus business, some website owners are willing (or tempted) to do almost anything to see their site at the top of search engine results. Black hat SEO is often what many such owners who succumb to the drive for a quick buck end up falling into. But not all black hat techniques have always been banned. Some of the methods started out as legitimate until unscrupulous SEO practitioners started to manipulate them to gain undue advantage.

 One example of black hat SEO is keyword stuffing. It involves the excessive use of a certain keyword on a website even when it does not make sense – all this in an effort to trick search engine bots into considering the site relevant for the given keyword. The keywords would be done as crudely as a simple listing of the words. When search engines clamped down on this practice, black hat SEO experts switched to a slightly modified version of this same technique – invisible text.

 For invisible text, one would stuff the pages with keywords but have the colour of the font used being identical to the colour of the background. Human visitors to the site cannot see the text but the text is visible to search engine bots. Search engines would thus direct users to the site only for visitors to find something somewhat different from what they were looking for.

 Another once widely used method was doorway pages. Doorway pages simply redirect a visitor to a different site. In other words, the link itself often has no content and solely exists for purposes of redirecting traffic to a different page.

So, should site owners consider using black hat techniques? It all depends on one’s value system and risk appetite. However, for someone intent on establishing a stable long term online business, black hat SEO would be a quick fix to a longer term problem and is not worth the risk. You might see rapid results within a few days or weeks but it rarely ends well.

 At some point and in most cases, search engines will sniff the scam out and permanently block the site from search engines. Getting your site unblocked when it was engaged in black hat SEO is near impossible. The only solution would be start all over with a completely new website – no doubt an expensive exercise