When you are non-existent in cyberspace and your website is crying out to be heard, it is so easy to look into alternative methods of making that first page on Google but at what cost? Let’s find out….

There are many methods to create short cuts to the World Wide Web but the underhanded methods involved are easily picked up by the search engines.

Spamming Meta Tags – like a red rag to a bull for the search engines as they can easily detect keywords which have been repeated many times.

Link Farming – over use of link trading to boost ranking is another popular scam and is detected by their distinct patterns which search engine algorithms are attuned to.

Hidden Content – achieved by cramming pages of text with key words and disguising them by using coloured font on a the same colour page. There is a strong risk that a fellow competitor could spot your scam and report it if the search engines don’t pick it up immediately.

Doorway Pages – these are pages which contain poorly written text based on using targeted keywords. If a surfer clicks onto a doorway page, he/she is usually directed to the legitimate website. By linking a doorway to the main website or using another simple redirect system, the website will become parsed by a search engine spider as it will analyse a sequence of words to discover if the text has been written for spamming purposes or for a legitimate website.

The black hat techniques above are just a few ways of spamming search engines with keywords in order to artificially climb to the primary pages of the major search engines. Easy to achieve but not so easy to correct once the search engines have latched onto any indiscrepancies. If any behaviour violates the guidelines of the search engine, the recipient may end up donning a virtual black hat!

What are the penalties?

For most search engines, the most lethal form of attack could be complete removal of a website from the index. This means that Google robots will stop crawling and indexing the site.

A softer approach could mean having your website ranking reduced. Often people assume that they have been penalized when they see their website slowly falling but in the world of search engines, rankings raise and lower on a daily even hourly basis. Alternatively, certain pages may be catapulted into oblivion because of the overuse of keywords.

Google sandbox effect – can it affect a new website ranking?

There is speculation that Google is wary of ranking new websites until they have existed for a set time period. This means that all new websites may be held in a sandpit until such time as it can be justified that the sites are not equipped with keywords to boost their ranking. Websites which are loaded with keywords could spend a significantly longer time in the sandpit and some stay there for up to three months.

How to tell if a website has been sandboxed.

Check to see if your site shows up in Google’s search engine results pages for your keywords including the less popular ones. If your site has been penalized, you could expect to find a grey bar on the Google toolbar or your website could display no PageRank. The reason why the Google sandbox filter exists is to identify new websites with overactive use of keywords as these are likely to have used black hat SEO techniques to achieve rapid results.

The only way to avoid the shame of wearing a black hat is to play the game fairly and build your website on honour and trust.

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