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 main objective as a website owner is to show up higher up in the search engine results pages as possible. Google is a very intelligent and sophisticated “machine” so what possibility does average joe web enthusiast have to appear in the search engines? Is there a method to allow yourself an upper-hand over others that aren’t “in the know”

Depending on what market niche you are attempting to crack, the solution to that question isn’t simply cut and dry – obviously the more competitive a market, the more keyword phrases have already been optimimzed by competitors and the harder it will be to outrank those pre-existing pages.

However, the search engines are definitely not 100% accurate. I’m sure you’ve experienced many times where you’ll enter a keyword to look for and the results are totally garbage – and out of these first 10 results, perhaps only 1 or 2 are really relevant to what you’re searching for. It’s obviously pretty frustrating if you’re always hitting the back button to redo your search (by the way, Google actually takes this into consideration now – the bounce rate of a website can actually be calculated based on how quick a visitor clicks the back button after arriving on your page.)

Of course, if your site is relevant and the information you display is tightly related to what the visitor entered into the search engine, then the likelihood of them them “bouncing” from your site should obviously decrease – seems blatantly obvious doesn’t it?

So unfortunately, over the years in order for some sneaky webmasters to get a good ranking in the SERPS (search engine results pages, these nasty fellas utilize tactics which are called “spamdexing” or as we like to call it Black Hat SEO. Spamdexing or black hat seo methods include using various methods to deliberately alter web content pages to artificially increase their positioning in the search engines results page The ability to outrank OTHER pages that are actually more related for a particular phrase, could this be considered sneaky and evil? Absolutely. Is this a common practice amongst webmasters? Absolutely!

Google, however, is really cracking down on some of these “old school” techniques of cheating the search engines. Some of these techniques include, but are not limited to:

Stuffing Meta Tags:

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

Keyword Stuffing:

This involves the practice of overusing a word to increase the amount of times the keyword appears on a page. Most modern search engines now have the ability to analyze whether the frequency is above normal level.

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.

Hiding 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.

Link Spamming:

Google determines the page rank of a site or page by analyzing the amount of incoming links that site or page has – the more offsite pages that link to your page, the higher your page rank. Some webmasters may create multiple websites at various hosting accounts that all link to one another. This is the most common form of Black Hat SEO techniques.

Cloaking:

Cloaking involves coding your site so that the content that appears to a human visitor is vastly different to what a search engine sees.

Each of the above methods is a type of Spamdexing or Black Hat SEO, 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.