Black Hat SEO to avoid at all costs.
Black Hat SEO is the SEO that can get you banned from the search engines. Black Hat SEO tries to fool the search engines into thinking you deserve better placement than you actually do. Black Hat SEO is cheating.
Here we will go over some of the more commonly used Black Hat SEO techniques so you have a good understanding of what to watch out for. After all, some of these techniques are offered as genuine services and I have personally seen people innocently lose online revenue because they have been deceived. And that's not SEO cricket.
Keyword Stuffing
I've put this one first as it is the most obvious and most abused of all the Black Hat SEO techniques.
If you know anything about searches and the search engines you will know they work with keywords and relevancy. You do a search, then the search engine reads all the words on all the websites to find the most relevant results for your search. (This is a vastly oversimplified description but is essentially what happens)
Keyword stuffing is the technique where a webmaster will over use a keyword in the belief that it will make the page appear if someone searches for it. This should never be done. It is important to make your keywords appear multiple times but only in the right context. Here are two examples using the usual "Plumber Blackpool" example.
1. Good keyword use.
xxxxxx is a traditional and friendly Plumber based in Blackpool & The Fylde. Our plumbing services cover pipe work, blocked drains, heating systems and just about any other plumbing need you may have.
2. Keyword stuffing.
Plumber Blackpool Plumbing Blackpool Central Heating Blackpool Plumber tools Plumber supplies Plumbing repairs Plumber plumber plumber.
Example one is readable but still has a good amount of keywords. Example two makes no sense as a sentence and this is typical of content that could be considered 'stuffed' with keywords.
Google and the other search engines are very good at spotting keyword stuffing. They even count the % of times a word appears on a page.
As a rule you should always write to make sense to your human readers then do a little tweaking once you have your base content. Good content is always king on the net.
Hidden text.
Hidden text is usually the technique someone will try after realising the keyword stuffing is a bad notion all round.
Hidden text is used to try and hide the fact that Keyword stuffing is happening. Its quite simple - if you have loads of white text on a white background, no-one can see it and you wont be penalised for keyword stuffing. AT least that's the assumption the prats make.
The search engines are a little better at reading than us. White text on white background - no problem. Black on black? No problem again. They can and will read it and not only will you be discovered for keyword stuffing, you will be seen as a hider of bad techniques. Yes, search engines know the text is white and so is the background. They know this is to hide keyword stuffing. The bad part for you is that not only will you be penalised for stuffing keywords everywhere you will also be penalised for trying to hide it. So don't be a numpty, just do it right.
Doorway Pages.
This is very much similar to the hidden text idea.
In a nutshell a web page is totally stuffed with keywords so much that it simply couldn't be read by humans.
Then the page is told to redirect to a normal page that reads perfectly normal.
The human visitor doesn't see the redirect page and because of this doesn't see the keyword stuffing. The search engines do see the redirect page and all the keywords. When this technique was first employed the results were fantastic but the search engines soon became wise and now it will only do a site harm.
Links Farms.
Building quality inbound links is one of the best SEO techniques there is so it stands to reason that there have been many attempts to abuse the way this part of SEO works.
Link farms often ask for a certain amount of money for you to add your website. When your website is added you automatically gain thousands of inbound links which makes your site look very popular to the search engines.
Again the search engines got wise and now this technique will get you penalised. Quality inbound links should take a user from one site to another, relevant, site to enhance the general user experience on the internet as a whole. When the search engines get cluttered with thousands of links that serve very little purpose for actual usability it hinders the system working as well as it could. The search engines work very hard to make sure links help the general user navigate a relevant and enjoyable web. They don't like people messing it up.