With SEO some primary goals include creating good content, increasing viewer usability, and promoting a website’s popularity, however there are certain practices out there that we avoid. These avoided practices are orchestrated to quickly or prematurely inflate rankings and take advantage of the factors that search engines utilize when ranking sites. These techniques are often referred to as Black Hat Techniques.
While folks assume there are benefits of using such techniques, there are also major downsides. After using Black Hat techniques a website may temporarily hold a high rank, it will most likely not last very long. Some of the other immediate negative consequences include a site being banned, having penalties against it, and could result in web pages being wiped of their search rank value.
Although search engines devote resources and effort to putting a stop to these methods some still exist. Search engines have worked consistently to ensure that white hat methods remain dominant and discourage the use of black hat tactics.
There are quite a few SEO methods out there that can inadvertently land a website in the search engine dog house. Whether a site is flagged, given the penalties, banned, or you just want to know what to avoid here is a brief list of some of the Black Hat SEO methods to avoid as they could cause issues for a web site.
- Cloaking
Cloaking is used to deceive the search engines, what a user sees is different compared to what a search engine robot (bot) would find. Although a site that is utilizing a cloaking technique is open to a penalty, or could be banned there are a few acceptable cloaking techniques called White Hat Cloaking.
- Manipulative Linking
Manipulative linking occurs in various forms and exploits search engine link popularity. A common method is using link farms, which is where a group of sites hyperlink to all other sites in the group and the process is generally automated. Some other examples of manipulative linking include self-referential links, paid link programs, and low quality directory links.
- Keyword Stuffing
Keyword Stuffing is easily discovered by search engines and it is unfortunately still performed by folks. The generally recommended keyword density is 3-7%, anything above 7% is considered stuffing because a website becomes illogical, unreadable, and probably un-useful.
Additional methods to avoid can be found at these links:
SEO Styles Make the Fight – 10 Deadly SEO Techniques to Avoid
17 Black Hat SEO Techniques to Avoid
Interested in learning more about requirements and what to avoid when submitting to a search engine check out the links below:
Yahoo!’s Search Content Quality Guidelines
Bing’s Guidelines for Successful Indexing
Thanks for reading!
Dustin
See more SEO tips for small businesses.
Tags: black hat SEO, engine, internet, method, search, search engine, seo
