Black Hat SEO

You can’t fool the Google machine

Here today gone tomorrow is what will happen to your site if you use these tactics against the Google machine. You may get a temporary jump on them and have a brief show in the sun but sooner or later and probably sooner the Google system will catch you and send you to oblivion. The end will be sudden without warning and without any discussion. You will find your website banned and in the sandbox. In short you have been busted!


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Black Hat SEO - what is it?

These are tactics used by those who think they are smart enough to trick the search engines. They are used most commonly by SEO companies that want to make a quick buck from you by pushing your site to the top 10 fast with these shady tactics. Get knowledgeable and smart; do not fall for the bait. Basically they devise all sorts of tricks and traps to outsmart the Googlebots, based on their knowledge and assumptions of Google’s main algorithms. 



So what are these infamous black hat SEO tactics that tempt us to try to trick Google?

- Spamdexing: (Or spamming the engines)
- Taking the keywords and repeating them over and over again in Meta Tags
- Doorway pages: Making specific pages to attract the searchers with popular keywords that are not relevant to your site. This page will then redirect them to your site
- Hidden text especially written for the Googlebots and invisible to the human visitor. This often contains many popular keywords, which are not relevant to your site.
- Keyword stuffing: Too many of the same keywords used in your content text. This is also termed as keyword stacking
- Link Spam:  here are the common ones:
- Link farms: gathering many links from any and every site and listing them in a huge list. No category no relevance no use.
- Placing links, which are hidden from visitors just to gain link popularity. No use to visitors no good for Google’s customers
- Spamming with expired domains. Expired domains are bought and pages are replaced with links to the offender’s site. Not linking to a relevant site.
- Mirror sites: Sites with different URLs that have identical content. This is done to falsely inflate the number of links going to a site. All these mirror sites will be linked to the main site. Google is very particular about original content
- Cloaking: this is when a visitor will see a different page from the Googlebots. Again this will be a trick with keywords to get a higher ranking. It can also be used to present different content to the Googlebots and visitors. Again this is based on using non relevant keywords and phrases
- HTML Code: There are all sorts of little tricks that can be done by twisting the HTML codes and putting in little scripts to confuse Googlebots and make Google rank the page higher.

How do those Google boys catch up with you?

The black hats think they are dealing with mere robots but they are not fully aware or choose to disregard the fact that there is far more behind the Google machine. Firstly the Google boys are not your ordinary run of the mill people as seen by their amazing success. They are 2 brilliant and clever programmers they know how to counteract cheaters and black hats, and are constantly working on improvements. They have a small but effective team of programmers to help them.

Google algorithms have hundreds of rules and regulations, most of which are highly classified information that nobody has access to. It is impossible for anyone to really tell which way the cat will jump as these algorithms change quite a bit, with the constant improvements Google makes to thier search engine.