BlackHat SEO

Submitted by: KevinB

Search engine optimization (SEO), is one way to help search engines find and explore your website. However, 'blackhat SEO techniques' have also appeared and thrown some doubt on genuine quality SEO. Search engines are improving the ability to weed out websites that employ blackhat SEO and therefore the best advice on this subject is to avoid it at all costs.

In terms of a quality website, there are some techniques that you should always avoid when trying to build up your website traffic. These are normally referred to as 'blackhat SEO techniques'. Essentially, employing blackhat SEO can lead to your website being banned by search engines and therefore making free traffic extremely hard to achieve.

The most common blackhat SEO techniques include:

1. Hidden text and links - All text should be equally visible to both the search engine and a normal visitor. If you hide the text from a visitor, but enable a search engine to read it, then you are likely to receive a penalty for deception or could incur a ban from the search engine listing.

2. No pages should contain any virus, Trojan or other Malware - Once detected by a search engine it can flag your domain as untrustworthy, consequently if you do appear in search results, it will be at a much reduced position.

3. Doorway Pages - This is a page displayed to a search engine that is not related to the site but aimed to fool the search engine and visitors into visiting it. Most search engine algorithms can detect this, while many general web visitors will report it directly to the search engine quality team. The result will inevitably lead to a ban or severe penalty being placed on your domain.

4. Spamming - This may be effective short term, however, in the long term search engines will put a ban on your domain and this can affect other domains that you have also registered. In essence, short-term gain equals long-term pain.

5. Cloaking - Cloaking or sneaky redirects can prove to be harmful to your domain ranking when they are uncovered. However, normal 301 redirects are safe to use provided they are for legitimate purposes.

6. Excessive Sub-domains - Creating multiple sub-domains with duplicate content will only lead to a ban after detection. The search engines have altered how they treat sub-domains and as such will quickly move to banning a domain that is suspected of trying to spam duplicate content into the index.

The blackhat SEO techniques mentioned above are not all the techniques that people apply to their methods in their attempts to gain top search rankings. However, they are some of the most common methods and they should be avoided in order to maintain trust with the search engines.

About the Author

KevinB is an article researcher for various topics including Internet SEO Articles for Ad-Matrix.net article directory.

Article Source: Ad-Matrix.net