One of the things you will often hear about black-hat SEO techniques is that they are popular because they work. At least in the short-term, some unethical SEO techniques are thought to give a site a bit of a boost in the rankings. Usually, these techniques are discouraged by reputable SEO firms because, in the long term, such techniques can harm a site.

What is often forgotten is that a lot of black-hat SEO techniques simply don’t work. Whether it’s due to the technique being outmoded or too visible, many underhanded techniques won’t even get you that promised ranking boost before landing you in a heap of trouble.

Keyword stuffing

This technique once had an effect because the density of keywords on a page was a very important factor in the search engines’ calculations. Because keywords are so vulnerable to abuse, the search engines have long since altered algorithms to take other factors into account. Keywords are still very important to your search engine optimisation, but the ease with which keyword stuffing can be detected makes this technique a foolish mistake indeed.

Related to keyword stuffing is hidden or cloaked text. Both of these are relatively easy for a modern search engine to detect. With keywords being just one of the factors in your ranking, these methods just aren’t worth having your pages penalised.

Site networks

These mini-networks used a number of sites all owned by one person to provide link juice for a central site. The idea was to increase a site’s link density in an easy way. The search engines, having access to information on the background of a site, quickly caught on to this scheme and in 2004 penalised SEO firms who practised this technique. Although it is difficult, gaining genuinely unconnected inbound links is the only way to boost your site’s reputation on the net, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about links.

Designing leader pages

In the past, leader pages were used to make a site appeal to all search engines. The idea was to subtly redesign a page to make it fit an individual search engine’s algorithm. This led to a number of incredibly similar pages on a site. As today’s search industry is dominated by Google, designing pages for separate search engines is a waste of time.

Directory abuse

Directories were once treated as valuable resources by the search engines, as they were moderated by thinking humans. The value of a directory link was its downfall, and soon there were a lot of previously good directories featuring swathes of unrelated links. The search engines detected the lower quality of directories and devalued directory links in their algorithms.

It is a sad fact of life that many people will do whatever it takes to succeed. A lot of businesses are tempted by the promise of swift rewards that black-hat techniques seem to offer. Unfortunately for black-hat operators, the search engines catch up fairly swiftly with underhand techniques. It’s much smarter to toe the line.

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