The Basics of Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is almost an Internet marketing phenomenon, –more and more web professionals are catching on to how they can make SEO marketing work for them. Meanwhile, black hat Search Engine Optimization, –a technique that endeavors to advance search engine standings by ways that are not approved by the search engine or engage in deception, –is also catching on. One way that black hat SEO does this is by using content that is typed in a color that is similar to the site background color or is situated off-screen where it cannot be seen. Another approach taken by black hat SEO, referred to as “cloaking”, is to use contrasting pages that appear differently to depending on whether its audience is human, or machine.

Yet another method used by black hat SEO professionals, i.e., glorified scam artists, is to repeat dissimilar wording to manipulate pertinency of the searches categorized by the search engine in a way contrary to the objective of the categorizing system. “Keyword stuffing” is also a choice mechanism used in black hat SEO. This is accomplished by the precision placement of keywords within a page to increase the keyword count, diversity and bulk of the page, –though not necessarily the quality, or originality of the content.

This makes the page seem more relevant to the search so that web crawlers are much more likely to find it. Although unproductive since 2005, “meta tag stuffing” is used within black hat SEO methods, as well. This is accomplished using keywords that are repeated in the meta tags, and instead, meta keywords that are not related to the page are used. As mentioned earlier, black hat SEO also uses hidden or invisible unrelated text, –called “cloaking”. This method is accomplished by using keywords or key phrases that are hidden, while also using the same color text as the background, using a font too small to read (fine print, eh?) or hiding them in the HTML code.