Beware of Black Hat SEO - WebmasterForums.NET

Shoshana · 07-23-2006, 12:08 AM

Beware of Black Hat SEO
by Stephan Spencer
May 30, 2006 Search engine spammers never prosper. Sooner or later, they get caught. And when they do, it's almost never pretty.
Consequences can include ranking penalties, removal of the site's "voting" power (i.e., ability to pass PageRank), incomplete indexation (i.e., a partial site ban), or, worst of all, getting "graybarred" (i.e., a total site ban, when the PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar is grayed out).
You can't exactly just pick up the phone and give Sergey or Larry a call with a "Mea Culpa" and then everything magically comes right again. It could take years for a business to recover from a site ban.
Not even the largest corporations spending big dollars on Google AdWords are immune. For example, BMW recently had its entire BMW.de site banned from Google for a period of time because it created "doorway pages"—pages full of keyword-rich copy created solely for the search engine spiders and never for human viewing. To add insult to injury, BMW was publicly outed by Google engineer Matt Cutts on his blog. He made an example of BMW, and all of the SEO community became aware of the carmaker's indiscretions.
Search engines rely primarily on automated means for detecting spam, with some auxiliary assistance from paid evaluators, spam vigilantes, and even your competitors. Within the bowels of the Googleplex and the Yahoo, MSN, and Ask HQs, PhDs write sophisticated algorithms to look for abnormalities in inbound and outbound linking, in sentence structure, in HTML coding, and so on.

That effort is augmented manually, by users submitting spam reports (such as the form at www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html), and by human reviewers conducting quality reviews. In fact, last year a confidential Google document called the "Spam Recognition Guide for Raters" was leaked to the public (and it's still available at www.searchbistro.com/spamguide.doc). The guide delineates some of the criteria for recognizing search engine spam, such as whether the site is a "thin affiliate."
"Black hat" search engine optimizers can be very sophisticated in their ways, and they operate under the principle of the ends' justifying the means. They are prepared to get caught, and when they do they pick up and move, setting up shop elsewhere. Or, more typically, they have thousands of other sites to fall back on. But you can't operate your business like that, nor can you afford to unwittingly employ an SEO agency that uses unscrupulous black hat tactics in order to reap short-term gains.
Are you confident that the tactics you, your web designer, and your SEO all employ won't get you slapped by the search engines? If you can't say with absolutely certainty that you're squeaky clean, then you'd better study the following list of black hat tactics to avoid:

"Sneaky redirects"—redirecting visitors immediately as they enter your site from a search engine
Hidden or tiny text—making the text the same color as the background; or shrinking the font size way down; or employing noscript, noframes, iframes, or hidden <div> tags to hide text and/or links
Keyword stuffing—the excessive placement of keywords within web pages (e.g., in alt tags, meta tags, etc.)
Targeting irrelevant keywords—optimizing for popular keywords that have no relevance to your business
Selling PageRank—selling text links to advertisers/partners in order to pass on PageRank to their sites
Trademark infringement—mentioning competitor names in your meta tags and elsewhere
Duplicating content—making numerous copies of web pages or excerpts of web pages
Spamglish—nonsensical, keyword-rich gibberish
Doorway pages—those that aren't useful or interesting to human visitors
Machine-generating pages—using software to create so-called content for search engines
Pagejacking—hijacking or stealing content from high-ranking websites and placing that content on your site with few or no changes
Cloaking—detecting search engine spiders when they visit and modifying the page content specifically for the spiders in order to improve rankings
Participating in "link farms"—linking to, or receiving links from, "Free For All" sites or link networks, which typically contain many links per page and are poorly organized
Buying expired domains with high PageRank—snapping up domain names when they expire with the hopes of laying claim to the previous site's inbound links
Multiple domains without redirecting—in effect this is duplicating content
"Thin affiliate"—ushering people to a number of affiliate programs without providing any added value
Linking to "bad neighborhoods"—linking to link farms or otherwise unsavory sites
Blog comment spamming—posting bogus comments to blogs, with links to your site
Guestbook spamming—posting bogus comments to sites' guestbooks, with links to your site
Splogging—creating blogs and posting to them content stolen from other sites
Google-bowling—submitting your competitor to link farms etc. to get them penalized

Note that the above is not a comprehensive list.
So why do spammers spam? Because sometimes it works—for a while. But it's not sustainable. It's only a matter of time before the spam-checking algorithms are tripped or someone turns them in. Recently, I blogged about the hidden links on the PRNewswire.com home page. Embedded within a noframes tag was the following:

<a href="http://www.unnamedcompany.com" Search Engine Marketing</a>
<a href="http://sev.prnewswire.com" Search Engine News Release Optimization</a>

I doubt it was a coincidence that shortly after my post hit the blogosphere the links were removed. However, they missed something: the links are still present on sister site PRNewswire.co.uk. I have a feeling those will be gone soon, too.
In short, don't do anything that you'd feel uncomfortable telling your Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing rep. You might think you're flying under the radar, but your competitors are watching and waiting for the opportunity to turn you in...
Originally published, in abridged form, in the June 2006 issue of Practical eCommerce magazine (www.practicalecommerce.com).

Darioush · 08-05-2006, 05:52 PM

I hate black hat guys, they are mostly a bunch of thieves stealing and recycling content taken from honest webmasters

dave A · 12-15-2006, 11:51 PM

Yesterday I indexed a website into my New Zealand based search engine and within a few seconds our webspider nearly fell over.
Talk about "Keyword Stuffing!" who ever had designed this site had spent ages adding pages of keywords within the CSS pages.
Text the same colour as the back ground and it even tried the now famous "Two hundred links!" from the sub domains to ourselves routine.

I just wonder "What next?" as web designers strive for higher and higher rankings.
The sheer maths of it all just don't work out. The volume of Supposed "SEO advisors" each of which claims to get your site into the top ten results and with a few billion websites not everyone can come up in the top ten results it is a maths impossibility.
The other night I was at an industry related function and I met an "SEO Master) his words. He told me that he could guarantee to get my site into the top ten results of any search engine.
So I mentioned my search engines name to him. He replied "I know the guy that owns that search engine, he's a friend of mine, All I need to do is have a word and your site will be in the top ten! He then suggested a figure of around $1000 bucks.
So I said I would like to know more and then I gave him my business card.
At the top of it is my search engines logo, my name, my email and phone number.
Ten minutes later the penny dropped! and he came over to explain, so I informed him that because he was such a good friend of mine any sites that were linked to his would all come top of the results for "Creative Bullshit!" becuase I can make sure it happens with a few digits in the database.
Then he tried to say that he didn't mean what he had said. So I advised him to get his keywords optimised and his content checked..

He and his company are now prime candidates for the "Prize prick of the years awards my company is now thinking of introducing.. Grin..

eimee · 01-17-2007, 07:13 AM

I would like to know about the new web development techniques, which I want to implement to our site. We ve to redesign our site with more effective way and increase the visibility. We ve the idea to exchange the link between other sites with minimum PR2 and how can we increase our PR with very short time. What all are the new techniques we can apply here, any idea about this share with us too...

http://www.newagesmb.com

montyauto · 02-09-2007, 01:30 AM

Quite impressive article.
I got some also to share here.

cher · 04-23-2007, 12:52 AM

Good article ! One should avoid these techniques for short term gains.

deep_3657 · 07-19-2007, 12:52 PM

I agree, i have seen many people myself falling off to blackhat techniques. Even if search engines do not detect the issue themselves, there are competitors to report the issue

mds · 11-08-2007, 01:05 AM

Would this include small business websites, created by an individual but crammed to the hilt with spammy paragraphs at the bottom of the page, does ok in google, would you report it or ignore?

zero_digit · 04-28-2008, 11:49 AM

Nice warning, having a black seo knowledge is a must, this is to know what is going on your page, may detect it earlier.