Black Hat Is Back 2 : The Evil and Dark Side of Search Engine Optimization

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to comprehend that the ultimate objective as a website owner is to appear as high up in the search engine results pages as possible. Google is a ultra intelligent and sophisticated “machine” so what possibility does average joe web enthusiast have to appear in the search engines? What is the secret ingredient that allows you to outsmart your competitors?

Depending on what market sector you are attempting to enter, the solution to that question isn’t always cut and dry – naturally if the niche you are entering is very saturated, the most common phrases will have been already optimized by your competition and it will be very difficult to rank on the first page.

However, the search engines are definitely not perfect. How many times have you queried for a term and experienced the first page of results are totally irrelevant? – and out of these first 10 results, typically 1 or 2 are actually relevant to what you’re searching for. Dang annoying to say the least when you’re always clicking the back button (by the way, Google actually takes this into consideration now – the bounce rate of a website can actually be calculated based on how quick a visitor clicks the back button after landing on your site.)

Obviously, if your web page is relevant and the information you provide is tightly related to what the visitor typed into the search engine, then the likelihood of them them “bouncing” from your site should obviously decrease – seems blatantly obvious doesn’t it?

So unfortunately, over the years in order for some mischievous webmasters to achieve a good ranking in the search engine results pages (or SERPS), these nasty folks utilize tactics which are called “spamdexing” or as we like to call it Black Hat SEO. If you are able to artificially raise your position in the search engines’ results by implementing techniques which are not considered above-board, then you are implementing some sort of Black Hat SEO method – even if it’s as innocent as creating an inbound link from another site that you own. Is it sneaky and/or evil to outrank OTHER people’s pages which are actually more related than your own? Absolutely. Are there lots of people doing it? Absolutely!

Google, however, is really cracking down on some of these “old school” methods of cheating the search engines. Some of these methods include, but are not limited to:

MetaTag Stuffing:

Using keywords in the Meta tags more than once and/or using phrases that are unrelated to the site’s content.

Stuffing Keywords:

This involves the practice of overusing a phrase to increase the keyword frequency on a page. Most modern search engines now have the ability to determine whether the frequency is above normal level.

Invisible or Hidden Links:

When a webmaster creates a network of links between multiple sites on the same or similar topic that he/she owns and then joins these together with invisible links. The multiple sites may or may not have unique content, in most cases they do not.

Hiding Text:

Hiding text (targeted keywords) on a page in order to increase a keywords frequency but placing the text where a typical visitor will not see it. In most cases, this is simply achieved by making the text the same color as the background color of the page ie. White words on a white background.

Link Spamming:

Google considers page rank through link analysis, the more web pages that link to your website the higher the ranking. Some webmasters may create multiple websites at different domain names that all link to one another. This is the most common form of Black Hat SEO techniques.

Cloaking:

Cloaking involves coding your site so that the content that appears to a human visitor is vastly different to what a search engine sees.

Each of the above techniques is a type of Spamdexing or Black Hat SEO, and will usually get sneaky webmasters who put them to use kicked out from the search engine or “sandboxed” – which is a fancy word for being delisted from the main search results. Not the best thing to happen as a webmaster. One of the most aggressive marketers out there is Howie Schwartz and his teachings are documented in a video series called Black Hat Is Back 2.