Black Hat Is Back 2 : The Evil and Dark Side of Search Engine Optimization
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the ultimate objective as a website owner is to show up higher up in the search engine results pages as possible. Knowing Google is so smart, what is the likelihood that an average web master can appear at the top in the SERPS? What is the secret ingredient that allows you to outsmart your competitors?
The solution to this million dollar question really relies on what market you are trying to enter – of course the more competition within market, the more search terms have already been gobbled up by your competition and the harder it will be to outrank those pre-existing pages.
Having said that, the search engines are definitely not 100% accurate. I’m sure you’ve experienced many times where you’ll enter a keyword to look for and the results are totally garbage – and out of these first ten results, typically 1 or 2 are really relevant to what you’re searching for. Dang annoying to say the least when you’re always clicking the back button (Which Google now takes into consideration by the way – the bounce rate of a website can actually be calculated based on how fast someone hits the back button after arriving on your site.)
Of course, if your web page is relevant and the information you display is tightly related to what the visitor entered 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 sneaky webmasters to achieve a good ranking in the SERPS (search engine results pages, these nasty folks utilize tactics which are known as “spamdexing” or as we like to call it Black Hat SEO. Spamdexing or black hat seo methods include using various methods to purposely alter web content pages to artificially raise their positioning on the SERPS Is it sneaky and/or evil to outrank OTHER people’s pages which are actually more related than yours? Absolutely. Are there lots of people doing it? Absolutely!
Regardless, since Google is definitely getting considerably smarter, some of the “old school” techniques of taking advantage of the search engines simply won’t work any longer. Some of these techniques include, but are not limited to:
Meta-Tag Stuffing:
Using keywords in the Meta tags more than once and/or using keywords that are unrelated to the site’s content.
Keyphrase Stuffing:
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 analyze whether the frequency is above normal level.
Hidden or Invisible 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. In most cases, these sites do not have unique content.
Hidden 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. This is commonly done by making some text the same as the background color of the page ie. White words on a white background.
Spamming Links:
Google determines the page rank of a site or page by analyzing the amount of incoming links that site or page has – the more offsite pages that link to your page, the higher your page rank. Some webmasters may create multiple websites at various 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 methods is a type of Black Hat SEO or Spamdexing , and will usually get sneaky webmasters who put them to use banned 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.
