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 goal as a webmaster is to appear as high up in the search engine results pages as possible. Google is a very intelligent and sophisticated “machine” so what possibility does average joe web enthusiast have to appear in the search engines? Is there a technique to allow yourself an upper-hand above others that aren’t informed

Depending on what market niche you are attempting to enter, the solution to that question isn’t simply black or white – obviously the more competitive brand cialis cheap order a niche, the more keyword phrases have already been optimimzed by your competition and the harder it will be to beat those pre-existing pages.

Having said that, the search engines are definitely not 100% accurate. How many times have you searched for a term and experienced the first group of results are totally irrelevant? – and out of these first 10 results, perhaps only 1 or 2 are really relevant to what you’re looking for. It’s obviously pretty frustrating if you’re always hammering the back button to re-enter your search (by the way, Google actually takes this into consideration now – the bounce rate of a website can actually be calculated based on how fast someone clicks the back button after landing on your site.)

Of course, if your web page is focused and the information you provide is tightly related to what the visitor typed into the search engine, then the chances of them them “bouncing” from your site should obviously decrease – seems pretty obvious doesn’t it?

So unfortunately, over the years in order for various sneaky webmasters to get a good ranking in the search engine results pages (or SERPS), these nasty folks use tactics which are known as “spamdexing” or as we like to call it Black Hat SEO. If you are able to artificially increase your position in the search engines’ results by implementing techniques which are not considered “white-hat”, then you are implementing some sort of Black Hat SEO method – even if it’s as simple as creating an inbound link from another site that you own. Is it sneaky and/or evil to outrank OTHER people’s pages which are actually more related than your own? Absolutely. Are there lots of people doing it? Absolutely!

Regardless, since Google is definitely getting a heck of a lot smarter, some of the typical ways of manipulating the search engines simply will not work anymore. Some of these techniques include, but are not limited to:

Stuffing Meta Tags:

Repeating keyphrases within the Meta tags more than once and/or using phrases that are unrelated to the site’s content.

Stuffing Keywords:

This involves the practice of overusing a word 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. Black words on a black background.

Spamming Links:

Google considers page rank through link analysis, the more web pages that link to your website the higher the ranking. 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 Spamdexing or Black Hat SEO, and will usually get sneaky webmasters who put them to use kicked out from the search engine or “sandboxed” – which is a fancy word for being delisted from the main search results. Not a good place to be. 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.

 







No related posts.