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… Read the rest