28 Jun 09 SEO SIMPLIFIED: Black Hat SEO Techniques

Taking our discussion on Black Hat SEO forward, in this article we shall focus on the techniques that have been denounced categorically as Black Hat SEO techniques by the SEO community as well as search engines, and which you should never use when optimizing your website.

Keyword Stuffing

This one is the first in the list of certified Black Hat SEO techniques. If you stuff your article with too many keywords, or put a list of keywords and nothing else in your webpage then your site will surely get penalized by the search engines. For more details, read How to use keywords in content.

Text Cloaking

Text cloaking means hiding the website’s text behind the background. This is done by making the text and the background color same. It is often used by spammy websites to hide the list of keywords from the visitors but keep it visible to the search engine spiders. In some cases the website also uses different texts for search engines and different text for visitors. In this case, the text written for the search engine ranking purpose is cloaked.

Doorway Pages

A doorway page is another failed Black Hat SEO attempt to fool the search engine. A doorway page is just like any other HTML page optimized for a couple of keywords or key phrases, but unlike other HTML pages, it is not visible to the visitors. Only the target search engines and their spiders, for which the page is designed, can see this page. When a user clicks on the doorway page in SERP (search engine result page), he or she is redirected to another page, the real website or webpage for which this doorway page was constructed. This activity is undertaken with an intention to artificially boost the traffic to the website.

Tags: Attempt, Background Color, Black Hat, Black Stuff, Doorway Page, Doorway Pages, Focus, Html Pages, Intention, Optimizing Your Website, Phrases, Search Engine Result, Search Engine Spiders, Search Engines, SEO, Target Search, Texts, traffic