Practicing any SEO element against the terms of search engine to increase the website rank in Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is treated as Black Hat SEO.

The term black hat is evolved from western movies in which good guys were differentiated from bad guys by wearing white hats.

On one hand it is assured to get high rank in search engines using Black Hat techniques, but on the other it is true that it has short life. Any time your rank can come down and your website can simply be banned by search engines.

Ask a simple question to yourself. Are you doing business for long term or short term? If the answer is long term then don’t ever try to look at Black hat techniques.

When you try to build link exchange or inbound links, make sure to check the website to which you are linking is not doing any Black Hat SEO. Because if search engine finds a website as Black Hat then those URLs which are related to it can also be penalized.

Some practices are by default comes under Black Hat SEO and some by mistake goes into Black Hat SEO. Here is the list of Black Hat strategies.

1. Hidden text /links

Can be implemented in following ways:

• By making the color of text and the background same(white font color on white background)
• Making the font size very small
• Hiding the text under layer and by using “no frame”
• Adjusting the DIV width and height to zero
• Placing content in “no script” sections
• Similarly stuffing links by any of the above method that is not visible to users.

2. Duplicate content

Creating multiple pages with similar content on the same domain or on sub-domain is called as duplicate content.

3. Alt tag spamming

Stuffing lot of keywords in the alt tag of images is also a spamming technique.

4. Meta tag stuffing

Stuffing lot of keywords in Meta Description and Meta Keyword tag is a spamming technique.

5. Title tag spamming

Stuffing keywords in the Title tag.

6. “Gateway” or doorway pages

This page does not have information which the users are searching for. The page will have some key phrases to get indexed in search results.

7. Cloaking

When a visitor comes to a page, a different content will be displayed and when a search engine spider crawls in the page then a different content will be displayed. This is done using server side scripting.

8. Article Spinning

Copying an article from others website and changing words with the words having similar meaning. This is also done using automated softwares. Eg: “Computer” can be changed to “PC”

9. Link Farm

Creating multiple website with multiple domains and linking domains with each other to get inbound links.

10. Purchasing expired domains

The domains which are already expired or nearly to get expired will be purchased then pages with the links to their actual domain will be uploaded on it. This is done to get page rank value. But Google seems to reset the page rank once the domain get expired. Purchasing domains are absolutely legal but trying to get page rank in this method is spamming or shortcut method.

11. Spam in comments

This is done usually in Blogs, Wiki and Discussion forums where the website accepts a comment from the user. Automated systems are used for this were it will create a comment with irrelevant content to the blog and with a link inside the content.

12. Mirror websites

Create multiple website with similar content is mirror website. Usually this is done if you have multiple keywords related to your website. The search engine gives more importance to the domain/URL having the keywords.

13. URL redirection

If the user types a URL and it is automatically redirected to another page or URL then it is URL redirection. This happens mainly when we want to update the site were some pages need to removed. If the pages have been indexed in search engine or if they got any page rank, to save that URL importance redirection is used. In place of automated redirection, you can use a message saying “this page is removed. Click here to go to home page”

You can use 301 redirection method but do not use HTML or server side scripting to do redirection.

14. Hitting trackbacks

Most of the blogs has the trackback enabled in which when someone refers to your blog; a comment will be added in the original blog with a link to the website in which the original blog is referred. This is again done to get inbound links.

Regards

Hyder

Download: List of 49 web directories

A simple way to increase your inbound links (Off-page Optimization) is to submit your website in web directories.

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