How to Detect Black Hat Strategies of SEO

The term white hat originates from old western movies where the good guys wore the white hats and the bad guys wore the black hats. Today the term white hat SEO refers to ethical search engine optimization techniques and black hat SEO refers to unethical approaches. Here some black hat strategies are described:

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing occurs when the Meta tags and content of the WebPages are loaded with a particular keyword or keyword phrase in a repetitious manner. This repetition makes content unreadable as well as it can also raise a red-flag to search engines. Although this may give you the top ranking for the short-term, it will gain a bad reputation with users and also possible banishment from search engines for your site

Hiding Text

Hiding the text consists of shielding keywords and phrases from the view of the user is also an unethical strategy. SEO companies may use this to increase SERPs. There are several ways to hide text

· Setting the color of the text same as the background

· Webmasters may also use the CSS "Z" positioning technique to place text on a lower plan behind images thus shielding them from user.

· Absolute positioning, where text is placed off the visible boundary of the main webpage content.

Landing Pages

Landing pages also known as bridge pages, jump pages, and gateway pages, are web pages that are designed to appeal to search engine spiders that are looking for pages to index. This is used to spam the index of search engines by falsifying results for particular phrases to send users to a different page than the one they intended.

Cloaking

It is the method of serving the Content to search engines that is entirely different from content presented to a users' browser.

Link Farms

Link Farms consists of a directory of web pages with little or no content that consists of hyperlinks that point to every other page in the directory. Most link farms exist for the purpose of spamming the search engine indexes (spamdexing) in order to help sites achieving higher search engine placement. If your SEO Company is suggesting listing your site in directories, make sure you find out which directories you'll be listed in and preview them on your own.

Spam

The ultimate in Black Hat Marketing... SPAM! Once labeled as a spammer, you risk taking a serious blow to your reputation, not to mention any legal issues that can peruse. Be very careful of any SEO expert that offers website promotion through blast emails. Ensure that any email going out with your web url are being targeted towards users with a general interest in what you have to offer and that it's not unsolicited email. Contact US