Black hat search engine optimization is not encouraged. That is the first thing you have to remember whenever black hat SEO is mentioned. And why is that? This is because black hat SEO is the use of unethical techniques in getting higher rankings among the search engines.

Many of the techniques used in black hat SEO actually used to be agreeable. But as many people went overboard with the techniques, the search engines and the general SEO community began to see the “black” effects it has to the online market. Black hat SEO is now characterized as breaking the rules and regulations of the search engines.

Black hat SEO is mainly concerned with the short-term goal of gaining high rankings. Because of the techniques used, it creates poor user experience, as the website was mainly created for the benefit of search engine spiders and not for the users and customers.

Here are main black hat SEO techniques to avoid, as is enumerated at Black Hat Search Engine Optimization, by Wendy Boswell:

Keyword stuffing: Packing long lists of keywords and nothing else onto your site will get you penalized eventually by search engines.

Invisible text: This is putting lists of keywords in white text on a white background in hopes of attracting more search engine spiders. Again, not a good way to attract searchers or search engine crawlers.

Doorway Pages: A doorway page is basically a “fake” page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher.

Black hat SEO is certainly tempting. But these short-term unethical techniques will only actually hurt your websites in the long run. Search engines are now crawling around and looking out for these search engine rule breakers to penalize them. In the end, you’ll be on the losing side.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 7:21 am and is filed under Marketing Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.