The Manifestation of Black Hat SEO

12 Aug 2010 by Graham Lyons - Featured, News, SEO black hat SEO, SEO, web design 1 Comment »

Black hat SEO all began a long time ago in a galaxy far far away. In the beginning, there was no dividing line…SEO was SEO and there were many different techniques and tricks to get your site to achieve the rankings you wanted. However, over time some started to abuse these methods, compromising site quality and content for hard and fast rankings.

As SEO Jedi Yoda always says:

“Desperation Leads to Cheating. Cheating leads to Spamming. Spamming leads to poor content, and poor content leads to the Darkside.”

Yes, it’s a bit geeky to compare black and white hat Search Engine Optimisation using a star wars analogy, but if you think about it, it describes it pretty well. Both black and white hat use the same basic methods (the force/SEO) except while some use it to make the web better and improve a site’s rankings through quality content (Jedi), others seek to use sneaky underhanded methods onsite to trick the search engines for their own benefit (Sith).

The fact is that most black hat methods aren’t so much created in their own right but are evolved out of traditional white hat techniques. Good SEO is all about ensuring that your site has a lot of well laid out quality content and that your tags and keywords are used appropriately and effectively. As a result the search engines will be more likely to view your site as a respectable source, as well as being able to crawl and index it more easily.

Of course this can take time to become effective and while search engines are more efficient when it comes to indexing these days, it can still require a lot of ongoing SEO to ensure that you achieve the rankings your site deserves. That’s why on occasion, some web owners or SEO’s turn to black hat methods in order to get rankings more quickly, using some of the following dirty under-handed methods:

Keyword Stuffing

Standard first port of call for black hat SEO’s is keyword stuffing. One of the most important elements for search engine optimisation is to ensure that your content is of the highest quality and is relevant to the keywords for which you are optimising. In terms of good SEO this would mean creating useful well written content which contains the chosen keyphases often framed by related terms to make them even more relevant.

One of the cardinal sins that black hat SEO’s often make is to sacrifice their site's quality content for what they think will get them higher search engine results. In order to do this they jam the optioned keywords into every nook and cranny of their site in the hope that it will make them (artificially) the most relevant site for that term. This can involve stuffing keyphrases into the main body of the site as well as into the title, description and keywords meta tags.

However, from a usability point of view this is like sabotaging your own site. Sure, you might get yourself higher up the ranking quicker but visitors to your site will be bombarded with some of the worst content that they’re ever likely to find and your page results in the SERP’s won’t make much sense to a potential visitor. So while you might improve traffic temporarily, you’re basically shooting yourself in the foot in terms of content by giving your site a bad case of keyword tourettes. Furthermore, this is an old trick and search engines will pick up on it pretty fast and ban your site.

Hidden Content/Invisible Text

Unsurprisingly black hat SEO’s have found ways around harming their content with keyword stuffing and this usually involves one of the sneakiest black hat practices to date. Hidden or invisible content.

In order to ensure that their website's quality isn’t depreciated for the user, black hat SEO’s often use subtle web design practices to hide their content from the users but not from the robots. That way they can keyword stuff to their hearts content knowing that their users see only the quality content that they want them to, while the robots are indexing some seriously keyword dense content.

There are a variety of practices that black hats employ in order to get away with this:

Website HTML has a variety of tags which have set uses, but can also be manipulated for black hat SEO purposes. The comments tag <!- Comment-> is extremely useful for documenting your code but can be used to apply keyword rich content. Other tags which are often abused for inappropriate SEO gain are the <noscript> and <noframes> tags as well as hidden inputs in forms.

Another way in which black hats often hide content is by making the text extremely small or setting the colour of the text to the same colour as the background.

Of course search engines do not look kindly on this kind of activity which is why they keep a look out for this kind of thing. Sites caught using hidden content will most often be penalised quite severely or even banned by the search engines.

Gateway Pages

One thing that can be said for black hat SEO’s is that they don’t give up easily. When keyword stuffing and hidden content just aren’t working out, the option of using a gateway page comes into action. A gateway page, also often referred to as a bridge or doorway page, is a page on a website which is setup to be as effective as possible for the search engine algorithms at the expense of content.

“But isn’t that pretty much the same as keyword stuffing?” I hear you say. In the content sense it kind of is, but with a gateway page there is absolutely no attention paid to the quality of the content for one simple reason. The trick to a gateway page is that it is only in place to direct users to the next page down the line whether through a selection of links or a redirect function.

As such, websites which utilise gateway pages often have dozens of gateway pages in place, each optimised for a specific keyphrase. In fact this kind of black hat SEO became so widely used that programs were created to auto generate these pages with just a few details required. These became known as machine generated pages.

Of course, if we’re aware of these methods, then the search engines certainly are and gateway pages are easier to identify than you might think. The fact is that the majority of gateway pages have an identical footprint due to the methods of their creation. Most are orphan pages due to the fact that while they link to other pages there are very rarely any pages directed towards them.

As a result, search engines which pick up on these gateway pages have a tendency to apply a pretty substantial ranking penalty relegating the entire domain to the back of the line in terms of search engine results.

Link Farming

Link farms were created by SEO’s to take advantage of many search engines dependencies upon link popularity. These link farms consist of a group of websites which all link to each other site within the group. Nowadays, link farms carry somewhat less weight in terms of ranking boosts due to the slight depreciation of mutual linking as a measure of site strength.

Once again this was a system which some SEO’s set out to automate when it was more worthwhile and countless link pages where auto generated. Fortunately for search engines, honest SEO’s and site owners, link farms are fairly easy to spot due to some specific attributes and can be easily removed from the search engine results pages. In addition, this kind of link building has been vastly depreciated due to the methods used for link exchanges.

Cloaking

As time has gone by black hat SEO’s have had to become more sophisticated as search engines have caught up and nullified their array of methods. Cloaking is a method that uses server-side scripting in order to deliver different content to the search engine spider than it does to the user’s browser. That way they can boost potential ranking of their site with a more optimised variation of the page delivered to any robots visiting the site. Another reason this is done is often to hide the real content from the search engines such as pornography.

Of course for every kind of backdoor or black hat SEO, there is a remedy and while cloaking and modern variations are regularly updated, search engines have an array of methods for tracking down these pages. One recent culprit caught using cloaking by Google was none other than BMW who found their rankings shunted fairly quickly until the issue was rectified. Many others aren’t quite so lucky.

Conclusion

So what have we actually learned here? Well the fact that black hat SEO is actually a lot of work and not the simple queue jump that many might have thought. The fact is that search engines have been dealing with black hat SEO almost since the inception of SEO itself and it is a constant Cozy Digital whereby unsavoury methods are regularly filtered out. The intended result being to create a level of standards on the web that ensures a site is ranked based on quality and not the tricks up their sleeve.

The fact is that black hat SEO may boost rankings, but it is the quality of a website that keeps people coming back. Furthermore, while using black hat SEO may boost your rankings in the short term, if caught you’ll almost certainly find your entire domain deprecated making it very difficult for you to build any success with it in the future.

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