Black Hat Methods

SEO is meant to get a website to the top of SERPs. There’s nothing wrong with SEO at all and is in fact a good thing. The only time SEO becomes unethical, which I’ve warned about in a previous post, is when supposed “SEO experts” use black hat methods.

Black hat methods are simply techniques used to improve a certain page’s ranking that are not acceptable according to search engine guidelines. Such methods are usually deemed unacceptable because they are deceptive and often lead to sites with content unrelated to the keywords typed in by the user.

Two of the most common black hat methods used are spamdexing and cloaking. Spamdexing uses deceptive means to promote irrelevant and usually commercial pages. Though sharing attributes with spamming it is not the same. Spamming does involve promotion at a massive scale and can be very irritating but in the end it does not use deceit. Spamdexing often uses spamming as well as other less savory methods together.

Cloaking is also very different from spamdexing. It uses SEO techniques to trick crawlers into indexing them and search engine algorithms to give them high page ranks for certain keywords BUT serves the users or visitors a different web page than what the crawlers saw.

Though black hat methods do lead to high page rankings in less time for some websites in the end it is actually not a wise thing to do. This is because search engines do penalize sites automatically when it is discovered to be using such techniques. Penalties of course means a much lower page rank or worse being removed from the search engine listing altogether.

By Sparky in Content, Design, Google, Google Rank, Keywords, Search Engines, Search engine, Spam, Website Promotion

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