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 objective as a website owner is to show up as close to the top in the search engine results pages as possible. Knowing Google is so intelligent, what is the possibility that an average web enthusiast can appear high in the SERPS? What is the secret ingredient that allows you to outsmart your competitors?

The solution to this million dollar question really relies on which niche you are trying to penetrate – naturally if the niche you are entering is highly saturated, the most targeted phrases will have been already optimized by your competitors and it will be very difficult to appear on the first page.

However, the search engines are definitely not 100% accurate. How many times have you queried for a keyword and experienced the first page of results are totally non-related? – and out of these first ten results, typically 1 or 2 are really relevant to what you’re looking for. It’s undoubtedly frustrating if you’re always hitting 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 determined based on how fast someone hits the back button after landing on your page.)

Logic would then dictate, if you are providing useful information that is highly related to the search phrase your visitor is looking for, then your “bounce rate” should obviously be less

Now despite all the above-board or “white hat” methods around, there have been some naughty webmasters who have achieved top rankings in the search engines using underground tactics which are known as “spamdexing” – or Black Hat SEO If you are able to artificially raise your position in the search engines’ results by implementing techniques which are not considered “white-hat”, then you are utilizing 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 sites which are actually more relevant than yours? Absolutely. Is this a common practice amongst webmasters? Absolutely!

However, since Google is definitely getting considerably smarter, some of the “old school” techniques of taking advantage of the search engines simply won’t work anymore. Some of these methods include, but are not limited to:

Meta-Tag Stuffing:

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

Keyphrase Stuffing:

The practice of overusing a particular word to increase how often the word appears within the content of a page. There is a generally accepted ‘normal’ level that most modern search engines have the ability to scan.

Invisible or Hidden 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. White words on a white 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:

This technique involves showing visitors and search engines different versions of a page.

Each of the above methods is a type of Black Hat SEO or Spamdexing , 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 the best thing to happen as a webmaster. 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.

 

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