Blackhat SEO is a select set of techniques that should not be used for search engine optimization of any website.Most of these techniques are devised to get a better page rank, by using unethical methods disapproved by most search engines.

If you use any of these following Blackhat SEO Techniques, chances are more for your website to disappear from SERP results soon or later.

  • Cloaking
  • Hidden Text & Links
  • Link Farms
  • Keyword Stuffing
  • Doorway Pages
  • Scraper Site
  • Link Flooding
  • Link Doping
  • Spamdexing
  • Referrer Spam

Cloaking
Some people use a method known as cloaking to generate separate pages for the search engines and a different webpage to the visitor. This is usually done using smart software that identifies the IP address of the search engine and that of the user to switch between pages. Cloaking is done to get a better placement for spam content or an irrelevant page in SERP pages, with the index of a relevant page projected to the search engines by these cloaking method. This technique also known as Page Hijacking

Hidden Text & Links
One of the oldest Blackhat SEO techniques is hidden text, which is done by changing the text color to that of the background to hide the keywords or text. Some smart ones even hide the links the same way as keywords. But nowadays the search engine crawlers easily find out these Blackhat SEO techniques.

Link Farms
Link Farms are not just a single website which provides links, rather a group of websites that will have irrelevant links to every other website in that group. Even though link exchange is allowed from other websites, the search engines don’t encourage this high volume of links being exchanged. So link farming is also considered as spam indexing.

Keyword Stuffing
Since keywords are the basis of SEO, some overdo with keywords like using keywords repeatedly. Keyword stuffing is nothing but stuffing related or unrelated keywords into a webpage repeatedly, as if making the content look good to search engines. Some push in the misappropriate keywords that are not related to image into the alt tags, which are used to display images is also keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing was used in the past to get the best search engine ranking and visibility for particular phrases. Keyword stuffing is no more considered by search engines but rather considered spam.

Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages that have nothing to do with website but created for search engines. Usually these pages are dumped with the major keywords to attract search engine spiders. Previously this technique has earned higher ranking for websites, so with more pages the website gets listed more than once in the SERP pages. Doorway pages are also known by the names bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages.

Scraper Site
Web Scraping is a method where a content of probably a better ranked competitor website is stored in another site known as a “Scrapper Site”. The Scrapper Site would be made visible for search engines while indexing, but when the user searches for the keywords the content of the original site is made available. Usually a scrapper site found by search engines will be eliminated in the SERP but some search engine consider it in the supplemental search pages.

Link Flooding
Usually to promote a website the webmasters use social networking, book marking sites, forums, and blogs by adding the links. Now users just for the sake of promoting their websites flood these sites with more links of their own. Since the purpose of having these sites is to have genuine links, instead stuffing ones own website links is considered link flooding.

Link Doping
Link doping refers to the practice and effects of embedding a large number of gratuitous hyperlinks on a website, in exchange for reciprocal links. Link doping is common in blog, social networking or book marking sites where one needs to add hyperlinks while blogging or book marking. Many users add a hyperlink of the websites they have never visited or add the hyperlinks of their own websites just for promotion is termed Link Doping. Link doping can give undue advantage for an irrelevant website to appear higher in SERP page.

Spam indexing
Spam indexing is otherwise known as search engine spam. It is the method to beat or manipulate the very purpose of indexing followed by the search engines. Since search engines always tries to give the user the relevant content, spamming of any kind like keyword stuffing, hiding links, cloaking etc is generally termed as spam indexing.

Referrer Spam
Referrer spam is a method used by websites to make URL request to another website repeatedly using a duplicate URL. Since search engines consider the referral links of the other website for indexing, enables the spam website that used referrer spam to get indexed. Following any one of the Blackhat SEO techniques listed above may make you loose the page rank of your website or even chances of getting banned by the search engines is more. So any Blackhat SEO method will end up the prospects of your website in very short time.

As the Internet marketplace has grown increasingly more competitive,companies and webmasters continue to search for new and improved ways to appear highly in the displayed results of search engines.

Some people and companies are willing to do whatever it takes to get ranked, and therefore end up delving into the world of black hat SEO technique.

What Is Black Hat SEO?

1. Black hat SEO is any search engine optimization technique or strategy that is against the stated or implied terms of the search engines. It’s the practice of fooling the search engine and its algorithm into giving your site or page a higher ranking. Black hat SEO typically produces quick, short-term results. However in the long term, sites capitalizing on black hat strategies typically become banned or blocked from search engine indexes.

Black hat SEO techniques aren’t illegal, but they are both risky and illicit. Some companies believe the quick results are worth the risk, or believe that their new strategies won’t be discovered. Meanwhile, Google and the other major search engines have been known to come down harsh on suspected or proven black hat companies and websites.

Examples of Black Hat SEO Technique

2. A variety of black hat search engine optimization strategies are used today. One example is including text on your webpage that is the same color as the background. The text is therefore hidden from visitors but visible to search engines, which can then use the text to rank and classify a particular page. This is an extension of basic keyword stuffing strategies, in which a webmaster excessively includes keywords and keyword phrases onto their pages.

Another example of black hat SEO is page cloaking. Page cloaking involves having two versions of each page, or a particular page on your site. One page is shown only to actual visitors, while the other version is “shown” only to the search engines.

Link farming is another black hat SEO technique. A link farm is having a large number of different websites that all link to each other. This is an attempt to take advantage of the importance of incoming links as a factor for determining site credibility — measured in Google as PageRank. Some black hat SEO practitioners actually “sell” PageRank, by selling outward links from their high ranking pages.

While most black hat SEO is used to gain a high ranking in the search engines, other techniques are used to help spread viruses around the web and redirect search engine traffic to pages that visitors did not intend to visit.

Black Hats work in the clients’ interest, plus protecting and promoting self.
Black Hats insist on grey hats, and deny the existence of Black or White. Very, very few admit to owning a Black Hat, though many boast of their achievements. Go figure.
Black Hats would be prepared, willing and happy to deceive search engines (and thus search engine users) in client’s interest.
Black Hats may be willing to deceive the client about methods: “results are all”.
Black Hats see search engines as the enemy; deceit is the name of the game, SEs are constantly looking to expose trickery and penalize guilty sites.
Black Hats emphasize off-site methods, getting ‘bums on seats’, with the hope that a percentage will convert, or at least return by another route.
Black Hats emphasize rapid results, accept risks, confident of a new fix, as older tricks are neutralized.
Black Hats boast of income, but do not concede that this is arguably defrauded from displaced better sites, and deny potential illegality. They will not even discuss it.
Black Hats believe that ‘White Hats’ all secretly use ‘Black Hat’ techniques, and are all ‘holier than thou’ hypocrites.
Black Hats believe in the survival of the fittest, and have no time for wimps.
For Black Hats, it’s all about technique.

Black Hat Tools easily available on Google

RSS Xploiter 2.3

Trackback Spider

Trackback Submitter

Pro Submitter

HyperVRE Gold

Blogomatix

Rss to blog

RSS to Blog Mass Installer

RSS to Blog – Article Content Builder

RSS to Blog – Article Extractor

RSS to Blog – RSS Directory Submit

Affiliate Feed Generator

Synonymizer

Content Solution 1.0

Content Solution 2.0

SLURL v.2.0.8

Simply-Jellybeans

Adsense Cloaker

Much has been made about blackhat SEO principles and, in general, greyhat SEO principles and techniques largely go unmentioned.The differences between black and white are obvious, but shades of grey begin to overlap and the line becomes blurred as to what is acceptable and what is not.

Ultimately you must rely on sound judgment and core design principles to protect you from possible damage should you cross over that thin line.

You would think that grey area would be sufficient enough that there wouldn’t be much trouble. But the issue is really one of human nature. If you examine the spectrum of gray – it varies from very near white to very near black. Because people are looking to get the most out of their SEO efforts (which can be very time consuming and costly) they are generally only operating in a small fraction of that grey spectrum – and it is in the dark grey to nearly black region that most operate in. It all comes down to risk and reward.

By intelligent design and understanding of SEO principles, SEO experts can design a site architecture which can allow for experimentation at different levels with different degrees of risk and still isolate those activities from impacting your money site. This is where an SEO expert is worth their weight in gold. You want to be able to walk that thin tightrope, but you also want to have a safety net below you so that if you fall, you don’t take down your core business site with you. This strategy is normally divided into “feeder” sites and “money” sites and involves the creation of many different easily created “feeder” sites for which more experimentation into greyhat traffic and SEO techniques may be explored.

As an example, let’s assume you have your primary business site (your money site) and you want to experiment with driving traffic via a greyhat approach. Rather than doing this experimentation on your money site, you would create one or more “feeder” sites. A feeder site can be very simplistic, such as a single page Squidoo lens or Hubpage. Frequently social media sites are used as feeder sites because of their ease of creation and because they get a lot of SEO juice (in other words, Google and the other search engines love them). Let’s assume that your business site is a PR3 site (Page Rank 3). You can increase its authority by linking from higher page rank sites back to yours and most of these social media sites are very high (PR6 and above) ranking sites. So if you were to create a few different Squidoo lens or Hubpages pointing page to your site and “feeding” traffic to it, not only would you increase traffic but also authority, relevance and page rank. It is important to note than the design of this architecture is crucial and you shouldn’t take this brief example as a blueprint, because it leaves out many vital details that you need to discuss with a credible SEO expert.

A key concept to understand when designed for greyhat experimentation is that Google does not penalize you for a blackhat site linking to your site. It does, however, penalize you big time if you link to a blacklisted site as it sees that as a credibility issue on your part. We can’t control who links to us, and therefore, Google can’t penalize us for that. So, greyhat experimentation would allow you to try out some different experiments on some of your feeder sites knowing that the worst case scenario would simply involve loosing that site and/or account. Keep in mind, many vital small details must be adhered to in order to insure the protection of your money site. Things that you wouldn’t normally think of, such as making sure your identity is not linked to all of these feeder sites or it will be easy for Google to tie them all together. Remember that greyhat techniques ten to me much closer to blackhat techniques than whitehat techniques, so you still need to treat them with the greatest of respect and caution. You simply cannot afford to jeopardize your money site under any circumstances.

Another example of a greyhat solution would be article or content “spinning”. Article spinning involves the automated generation of multiple unique versions of an article. So, you write it once, run it through a program and spit out dozens or hundreds of unique versions. This is done because the search engines give high preference to unique content. Article spinning can either be completely whitehat, greyhat or completely blackhat depending on how you do it. A blackhat version involves completely automated efforts that generally produce very poor results, but do it with minimal effort. Whitehat article spinning, would essentially me just writing dozens of unique articles – 100% safe, but very time consuming. Enter the greyhat approach. Greyhat article spinning software is pretty intelligent. It requires more time than a purely automated approach, but far less time than a complete article rewrite approach. So, for example, a greyhat article spinner may require you to provide two variations of every sentence in your article (thus twice as much work) but from those variations it may spin that article into dozens of unique combinations of content all of which will be very human legible and articulate since every word of it was written manually. Blackhat techniques often use synonym and thesaurus look up tables and automated text and phrase substitutions, etc… all of which generally lead to poor results.

Hopefully by now, you’ve seen the benefits and risks involved with greyhat SEO principles as well and can recognize the essential role that an SEO expert will play in hand crafting and designing an SEO friendly architecture for your site or network of sites.