Black Hat Techniques

Black hat SEO techniques are used by some SEO companies, who promise to provide instant, improved rankings to their clients' sites. Such methods are strictly disapproved by all the search engines, as they involve wrong and deceptive means. Some of such Black Hat methods are listed below for our clients to be aware off:

Redirecting sites

These sites can also be named as “Doorway sites”. They act as doorways, leading you to another website. These are generally present in the form of a link on a site. When a visitor visits that site, he, for further information, clicks on the links listed on that site, thinking that they are leading to some relevant information. But those links although have a different URL name, but when clicked upon, open a different website all together. This technique is used for redirecting the visitor of one website to another.

Such redirects are discouraged by all search engines and should not be practiced.

Hidden Text and Links

This is a very common tactic which is used by webmasters to trick Search Engines into believing that their sites contain genuine and related text. They add some related text with keywords into their web pages, for the viewers to read. But alongside, they also add some hidden text in the page. This is done by taking some irrelevant texts and links and decreasing their font size to minimum, and further more, changing their font color to same as that of the background.

If given a closer look, visitors can see blank or vacant spaces on the top or bottom of the web pages. These are where the hidden texts and links are placed, and they can be viewed by pressing “Control - A” from your keyboard.

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Cloaking

Cloaking can also be termed as a method used for tricking Search Engines into believing that the site contains optimized web pages. Also known as a technique to hide the contents of a page, this method displays different pages for the search engine to view, and different for the viewers to read. This is mostly done by using JavaScript, with the help of which, sites can be redirected, and so can the visitors.

Such a practice can be heavily penalized by the search engines.

Automatic Page Generation

Claiming to create new and relevant content for their clients' web pages, many SEO companies adopt this dishonest practice. But, instead of writing unique content for those particular topics or keywords, these companies make use of some automated software programs like ArticleBot.

These programs search the net for the text suiting the required keywords, and pick up all the content from different websites and web pages. This content is then stolen and rearranged to create various new web pages for a site. This method helps the webmasters to generate vast amount of web pages within no time at all, and artificially boosts the amount of web pages on your site quickly.

But this practice results in strong penalties from the search engines, along with the charge of Plagiarism from the websites whose texts have been stolen and used. Also, mostly all search engines now have filters which can easily detect duplicate, copied or plagiarized content being used in any website listed with them.

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Black-hat Link-Building

Quality Link building is considered as the best source of increasing and achieving high page ranks for any site. The more quality and genuine links you have for your site, the more popular it is on the search engine rankings.

However, when you see an SEO company, which promises to give your site 1000 and more quality links, there is a possibility that they might be opting for the Black hat technique. This involves getting links from dishonest tactics like Link Farms, bad neighbors or irrelevant partners, whose websites are in no relation to the websites they are linking to. Also used are various other tactics like submitting to the Free for All link sites or directories, creating fake blogs with links at the bottom and exchanging reciprocal links with non relevant websites.

Today, mostly all the major search engines can differentiate between the quality and spam links, and if they come across such spam or fake links in any site, they can penalize the site immediately.

Search engines with their tracking filters can easily detect any malpractices, if any of the sites is indulging in them and trying to trick the search engines. Such sites are penalized automatically by either by loss of the page ranks or by complete elimination from the search engine databases.

All the honest and reputable SEO companies never indulge in such Black hat or dishonest techniques to gain high rankings with search engines. They will rather work hard on making their clients' sites more genuine, content rich and search engine friendly.