Why you should avoid Black Hat SEO

If you’re new to the field of search engine optimisation, you may have never heard of the term “Black Hat SEO”. So what exactly is it? Basically, black hat SEO is about “tricking” the search engines to gain higher search rankings by using dubious and unethical techniques. Black hat SEO follows the simple ideology of “do anything to improve your rankings, regardless of how you go about it”. To use a fairly crude metaphor: if sacrificing cute – fluffy - kittens were to give an improvement in search engine rankings, a Black Hat SEO’er would have no qualms about doing it. Luckily that isn’t the case, so kittens everywhere can rejoice! Real black hat optimising techniques include (but are not limited to), some of the following:

Keyword stuffing:

Take a web site page and then stuff as many extra keywords which may or may not have anything to do with your page’s content or service. Now we’re not talking about writing relevant, themed, content, but rather just plonking down as many keywords as you can think of. The words may be related to your web site’s content: such as putting a list of every DVD brand, make & model on one page. But the point is these “stuffed” words will simply be there to garner search engine traffic, and do not contribute anything to the end user experience. Or if a Black Hate SEO’er is particularly game and stupid, the keywords may include topics completely unrelated to the site’s theme, such as “Britney Spears”, or what not.

The good old invisible/hidden text manoeuvre:

Basically utilises the same “content” as above, but tries to hide it so that search engine spiders can see the content, but an end-user cannot. Common techniques include putting coloured text on the same coloured background, hiding the text by having it styled “display:none” in a CSS style, hiding the text in a form or DIV element which is too small to see, or placed off-screen.

Doorway pages:

A doorway page is a web page simply created for the express purpose of getting ranked in a search engine, and offers nothing for the end user. It may be a page crammed completely full of useless content, or it may be one page which has been “auto-generated” into a thousand variations which have no purposes other than to breed and multiply to proliferate into the search results.

Cloaking:

Cloaking can be done many ways, from a simple redirect to more complex techniques which involve serving different pages to a search engine from those presented to the end-user. An example of cloaking would be to have a page “sent” to Google which is about “dogs” but when the user clicks on that page, the server detects that they are not a search engine, and sends them a page about “cats”.

Why not to use black hat practices:

Essentially: it’s wrong. You’ll go blind. Stop it! Black hat SEO is about short-term gain, and is *not* about building a long-term, highly productive web presence. It can generate traffic initially, but you can bet that it will only last for so long. Search engines are smart, and one day they will simply drop all your listings, or if you’ve been really naughty, simply ban your website altogether. This means no more organic traffic and in the long run that is really going to hurt your website. More importantly, black hat techniques are bad for the end-users, and those are the guys that will really make or break your online business. If an end-user searches for “dogs” and lands up at a page about “cats”, what do you think they will do? They will be thoroughly unimpressed and simply click away, and you’ve just lost a potential customer. Treat your users right and the search engines will see that you are providing a quality experience, and therefore they’ll treat your website with the same respect. Black hat search engine optimisation practices try to skirt around this golden rule, and the end result for your website will be a big thumbs down from the search engines. It may not happen overnight, but it will happen, as the search engines are always trying to improve their search algorithms. So don’t give into the quick and fast temptation of bad SEO practices, you’ll be thankful in the long run.