Search Engine Optimization Goes Black Hat
October 12th, 2009 by Nick
Black hat SEO has been around since the inception of search engine optimization. Since the beginning of the internet, website owners have been looking for a loophole in the rules that they can exploit to gain an advantage over their competitors. Unfortunately for them, the search engines have evolved over time and see this underhanded behaviour as black hat SEO.
Not only that, but indulging in black hat SEO, whether you know it or not, can get your website banned from the engines. This leaves you with no way of being found by searchers as your website will never show up in the SERPs. So, it goes without saying that you want to invest your time and money only on the best white hat SEO practices. However, there are constantly new black hat tactics that crop up here and there as website owners continue to try to outsmart the engines. In order to protect yourself against black hat, you need to know what those tactics are.
New tactic number one
There is a new trick up the sleeves of deceptive website owners and it is called scraper websites. Now, scraper websites scrapes all of its content from the pages of other websites, in other words, they steal someone else’s content. Stealing is frowned upon on the internet, especially when it comes to fraudulent content that is not really yours.
It may seem like a great idea to permanently and without permission “borrow†content from competitors and other sources. This is especially so when that content gets those web pages ranked tops in the SERPs. However, the search engines are going to pick this up sooner or later and they will ban you; blacklist you. This defeats the objective of the entire scraping project in the first place as it is entirely the opposite of getting a top spot in the SERPs.
New tactic number two
You may or may not have heard of “splogs†before. Splogs are no more than blogs set up for the sole purpose of spamming or spam-dexing. What we are trying to say is that the blog offers nothing informative or of any use at all other than the artificial rising of the rank of affiliated websites. Instead of spamming people’s email inboxes, you are posting post upon blog post of promotion for the affiliate website, your website. Not good and a definite black hat SEO tactic.
New tactic number three
Playing the cookie monster is not going to do you or your website any favors. Cookie stuffing is the act of dropping a cookie from an entirely different website than your own onto a visitor’s computer when they visit your website. Or, perhaps your cookie is being dropped by another website. Cookie stuffing may earn you money, but it is risky revenue your website can do without.
Bad stays bad
No matter which way you try to spin it, black hat SEO stays black hat and it stays a bad idea for anyone wanting to build a successful website. Just don’t do it and educate yourself about black hat tactics to prevent yourself falling prey to the advice of a black hat optimizer.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS feed.
Link to us
If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.
[...] Follow this link: Search Engine Optimization Goes Black Hat | SEO Consult … [...]
I think one way of finding out if other sites are scraping your content – or indeed if your content has been scraped from somewhere else if you have someone providing content – is to use the service at http://www.copyscape.com which will locate significant duplicated text content. One problem you might have is determining which site the content first appeared on, yours or the competitions. So might the engines!
A good article, bookmarking.
BB
I once heard a story about a man that became very wealthy in a very short time. When he was interviewed by the press and asked how he achieved so much so quickly his response was… “I decided to set out to earn an honest living and found I had no competition”
Stick with the white hat techniques they work much better and for a longer period of time.
Thanks for the post!
Well done for pointing out the new challenges. There are products out there now that can copyright your content. Maybe they will get more important over time.
http://www.digiprove.com/
[...] Search Engine Optimization Goes Black Hat | SEO Consult … [...]