Black hat tactics are infamous in the world of search engine optimisation. They guarantee two things: quick rewards and possible prohibition by the three major search engines.

Yet businesses still fall prey to the allure of Black Hat and SEO companies that practice the art of deception. While signing up with a search engine optimization company that uses these methods is a major pitfall in itself, here is an outline of the techniques which all website owners should be careful to avoid.

Keyword stuffing basically means cramming lots of keywords into text to gain higher ranking. It’s an easy one for search engines to spot, while making it virtually impossible for visitors to read anything on the page. More subtle, but with similar thinking behind it, is the use of hidden text, and tiny text. Keywords are stuffed in the text, but hidden behind graphics or by being coloured the same colour as the background. With tiny text, fonts that are too small to be visible to the human eye are used to stuff keywords into the page. In both cases, spiders will pick up on the deception and disregard the website.

Cloaking has long been regarded as black hat practice although there are some who would argue that it could be used as legitimate SEO if used correctly. Even so, the technique of cloaking – which involves presenting different content to the Search Engine Spider and to the human user – involves deception of the spider and as such is generally regarded as black hat and shouldn’t be employed. Should the search engine’s algorithms find evidence of cloaking, the usual penalties of banning would apply.

Doorway pages involve more black hat trickery. A single page is constructed, optimised for a specific keyword, and only exists to rank in the search results. It links back to the original website – hence the name. While this may not sounds inherently unethical, some would argue that a Doorway Page is simply a one-page click-through advert for a website. If you are finding it hard to define a doorway page on your website, ask yourself this question: Is this page relevant to the contents of my website and do I link to the page in my site navigation? If both answers are ‘no’, then you have a doorway page. As with many black hat methods, doorway pages may initially bring users to your website, but after realising they have been duped they will just as quickly leave again. There is also the risk of being discovered by search engines and penalised.

Content is king in search engine optimisation, which explains why plagiarism plagues the Internet. In some cases, the plagiarism is so clumsy as to include the exact copy, per verbatim, taken from a top ranking page and included in the text of another website. A waste of time – not to mention unethical and illegal –as search engines will easily find and punish those websites.

Other cases of content duplication can be as easy as using the same content on another page within the same website, or using the same title on every page.

The penalties that enforce deceptive Search Engine Optimization may seem harsh – another good reason to work with a reputable white hat SEO company.

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