Revisiting Black Hat SEO
Black hat SEO became popular during the mid 2000s. It aims to manipulate a website to trick search engines into giving it higher search engine rankings. Although these tactics are long gone and not effective anymore, it is still important to understand what they are, how they work, and what techniques they use to achieve their purpose.
Duplicate content
There are actually different ways of demonstrating a duplicate content. One way is to publish a post/content on different and separate websites. Another is by copying or literally duplicating the whole website onto a different one that’s registered under a different domain. Some people use another technique wherein contents are copy-pasted to different pages of the same website to lure the search engines to crawl on these pages.
Keyword stuffing
It is a technique where developers hide keywords and phrases onto a page in order to increase the possibility of being crawled by search engines. Normally, they hide keywords and phrases so that they are not visible to the readers.
Doorway pages
Also known as jump page and portal page, a doorway page is used when web masters submit bridge pages to search engines to improve their traffic.
Cloaking
This technique shows two different sets of content for the same website, one set for the search engines and another for the user. The content shown to search engines is different from what is presented on the user’s browser. It is used to fool search engines so the site can have higher ranking.
False/Fake headlines
This is a classic tabloid technique adopted by SEO practitioners to deceive readers. People searching for news stories will see these websites that are supposed to have these stories published under interesting headlines. They will click on the website URL only to find out the story wasn’t really there.
Brand Wrecking/Praising
Over praising or saying negative against anything, whether it’s a celebrity, a book, a movie, or a product, will attract readers to a website. People love gossip and controversy, and when they search for popular people or books or products, search engines will read the website and increase its ranking.
Allowing Spams
In WordPress powered blogs, moderators disable the Akismet feature and allow spammers to comment on their post. Before approving the comment, they edit the anchored links provided by the spammers and redirect it to their site’s pages.
These are some of the techniques people use for Black Hat SEO. Many SEO firms today are still employing Black Hat SEO as a component of their business. Although the techiques listed above are considered a “has been” in SEO fakery, Black Hat SEO is constantly evolving just like the regular legit SEO. Beware, because fakers do not stop studying and understanding the latest search engine algorithms to create a better and more deceptive Black Hat technique. Their ultimate goal is to lure the search engines and deceive the web owners.
This is a Guest Post By Warner. Warner is interested in everything online that fuels discovery. I find SEO a fascinating puzzle so of course produce SEO Reseller Plans, working at Endless Rise
Category: SEO
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Warner is interested in everything online that fuels discovery. I find SEO a fascinating puzzle so of course produce SEO Reseller Plans, working at Endless RiseSubscribe
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Twitter: metalwebradio
says:
Fake headlines and brand wrecing is not black hat. It is marketing trix made to fool the reader and not search engines.
As a reader it is annoying and personal I stay away from sites using this metods.
Yes he is right it is not black hat SEO it is only to get traffic by showing fake headlines.
Well you shared all other ways of Black Hat here. Thanks for it. I never used it and I always believe in white hat.
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You are right mate, those may not be Black hats but are certainly unethical and one should stay away from using that kind of techniques. Thanks for the visit and the comment
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Exaggerated headlines, Comcast.net wins the prize hands down
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Lol…sounds funny…never knew that comcast uses exaggerated headlines
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I find the last part fascinating, the idea of allowing spam and editing the anchored text to direct to your own pages. I’d never even thought of that, or heard of it.
Of course, I don’t spend much time considering black hat SEO, haha. But still, some of the techniques, pretty tricky…
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Well I too did not know about that one until I read this post. But well I never research about black hats since I stay away from it.
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I wouldn’t think this strategy would be too effective. If folks are spamming, their comments are likely to be one of two things: Unintelligible gibberish, or duplicates of five million other “great-post-dude” comments. I don’t see this adding much content weight to your page or to your link; you could accomplish the same thing with a random text generator. If, on the other hand, the comments you get are intelligent and add value… they’re not spamming.
Hey Warner,
Thanks for sharing some of the common Black Hat SEO techniques normally utilized. It’s important for people to realize the difference between good and bad SEO.
I think keyword stuffing and duplicate content are the two most common out of all black hat SEO out there. Thanks for sharing your insights.
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True John, Keyword stuffing and duplicate contents are certainly used a lot but the bad part is that most of the newbies do not know that it is black hat.
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Twitter: rohitbatra14
says:
Black Hat SEO is still being used by many people..specially Keyword Stuffing is the most prominently use done…
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Yup Rohit, I have even seen some professional bloggers do that but it is better to stay away from them since their benefits are only for a short time, in the long run it causes more harm
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Black Hat SEO is something which can’t be exactly defined but the most common things which i come across is some content for different websites and keyword stuffing.
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Yup you are true, Black hat or unethical is a boundary that certainly cannot be exactly defined since something that is ethical can be unethical in the other persons eye but yes Warner has mentioned some of the most used Black Hat methods
Shiva Chettri recently posted..Magazine3 TechBlog Theme Review – Perfect Tech Blog Theme
If a person actually seeks to add value and contribute useful information they will do quite well, thank you, without using black hat methods. Which does not mean its a good idea to build links.
Thanks a lot Warner for the great post.
Shiva Chettri recently posted..Revisiting Black Hat SEO
Doest that keywords hiding work good for ranking. As the popularity of wordpress increased there are plenty of wordpress plugin developers who adds there website link in footer ..
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There are plenty of website today present which are contains duplicate contents from other websites. Still they are good and received good serp
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Hi warner444,
The things that you have right in this post are true, but this is exactly related to black had SEO from 10 years ago. I agree this is not working. However, this is not black hat SEO, the topic and term is going a bit deeper than on-page optimization which probably will not gonna lead to any serious penalties especially regarding duplicated content.
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??
@JAKE
Interesting thoughts Jake? So you don’t think that duplicate content would cause your site to receive a penalty? That’s exactly what the Farmer Update by Google has started doing.
@WARNER
I agree with most of Warner’s points (sorry Warner) but disagree very strongly with the Brand Wrecking and Celeb stuff.
These sorts of posts are interesting, and labelling it simply as black hat SEO isn’t really the right thing to do. If you could create a post on the top 4 ugliest celebrities, or 4 celebrities that look like famous dog cartoon characters, some people may want to read it lol.
Its almost like saying your own opinion isn’t valuable on the web. If you think a brand is a load of Chazwozza, then you have a right to tell other people why, as far as any reader is concerned you could be making it up anyway.
For the good of things you actually start debate about something, and others that may feel the same way as you, that previously said nothing, may begin to engage with others about it.
Comparing the celebrity or brand thing to topics like SEO. It is entirely your own opinion what does and doesn’t work, have you ever slated Google before?
Thanks
Interesting post….
Mark C
You make good points about writing about things people are interested in but there is a fuzzy line in the sand where making up a lot of stuff only to gain attention becomes a little offensive and ridiculous. Not all link bait is good. We bear a little responsibility, I feel, to maintain some level of common decency in life unless we prefer pandering to the mob. I am not saying you do this and the celebrity world seems to thrive on a lot of controversy.
Apologies for the previous comment, all though i stand by it, i does read a little harsh as well, busy day at work lol.
Although it doesn’t sound ethically correct to make up a story, newspapers do it all the time, with pretty much no evidence what so ever. Unfortunately stories like that are what people want to read, its just a fact of life. Gossip is one of the most overpowering tools in a marketing career.
Still good points though mate, and yeah u are right we should have some level of decency, but it rarely exists anywhere in the media eye.
Duplicate content is not normally a black hat technique, it’s a problem created inadvertently by webmasters. Where it becomes black hat is when it is a deliberate strategy by scraper sites that manage to get crawled before the original publisher. The best defence against scrapers is to ensure your content is crawled quickly.
@101 interesting point about getting indexed quickly. Most WP blogs get indexed in minutes. Google now has a rel=”author” tag. Here is a good discussion on using it http://yoast.com/wordpress-rel-author-rel-me/
@wordpress premium themes: true lots of duplicate content goes well, news for example. Just don’t have duplications on your site.
All link building is Blackhat unless its natural.
Dont believe me?
According to Google’s TOS, natural links are those links other sites point back to your site without the need to pay for it, ask for it, comment for it or insert a link in your hundreds of purposely written articles to gain it.
So, if all link building techniques are actually manipulating search engine results, does it not stand to logic that all link building is Blackhat and off-page SEO practiced by most SEO firms is in effect, Blackhat?
Think about it!
Twitter: xtrmlyrsky
says:
I guess Google is smart enough now to detect these black hat techniques. Somewhere i got to know that Google rolls out one new algorithm each day to deal with such things and improve the search results.
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Twitter: RoseWillington1
says:
I don’t think that black SEO is the right variant. I try to use white methods. But if not speak about spammers and doorways there is very thin border between black and white seo. For example when we try to manipulate the search engines by editing robots.txt or by our metatags, in some way it’s possible to say that it is one side of black seo…