19 Jun 2007

Black Hat SEO techniques

A few people have inquired whether I use Black Hat SEO techniques. The answers is a big NO. I do not wish to have my web sites banned by Google and other search engines.

In case you were not aware, Black Hat SEO refers to SEO techniques that do not conform to search engines' guidelines. These involve rank improvement techniques in ways that are disapproved of by search engines, or involve deception.

An online friend of mine had been complaining that her blog page rank was still 0 even after a year. She was quite unhappy considering that before she moved to her own WordPress powered blog with her own unique domain name, her old Blogspot blog had a Google Page Rank of 4.

I later discovered a possible reason - she was using a redirect script to send visitors from her old blog to her new blog. This is considered as one of the black hat techniques.

Another popular black hat technique involves hiding text, by using text of the same colour as the page background, using text in invisible div or positioned off screen so that key words are in fact invisible to users but not to search engine spiders.

Cloaking is another method called that involves presenting one version of a web page to the spiders and another version to human visitors.

There are lots of other such techniques.

DON'T use them because if the search engines discover that you are using black hat methods, they WILL penalize you.

3 comments:

rubixcubeman said...

The Idea: I'm not sure if this work but if it does that will be really cool. I had this brain wave, or brain fart. I wonder if you can use free sites to boost your page rank by back linking to your main site from free sites like blogspot.

Further optimize this by making these various 'landing pages' an extension of your existing domain so that the pages are spidered by the search engines. Your 'landing pages' have to be a bit crafty, and not appear as overt advertisements per say. But each ' Blog ' posting could be a part of a main category linked to from your actual domain, which can be creatively linked back to at the bottom of your blogged page.

The map: could be as follows: Domain -> Category -> Blog Posts for this category -> Category page -> links to various search engines -> And various 'Dig' and 'Stumble Upon' methods -> add adsense and others -> link back to
the domain. " For those interested in reading more go to www.profitindex.org"

The reason I wonder this is because I had a magazine in the 90's that always had excellent google ranking. Now that I look back I only ever used free pages to support it, which were linked to by other free pages.

The Logic: Since those companies pay to have their sites listed on the top of search engine rankings to increase exposure to their ads. Often paying per million page views. I wonder if this method can be used to increase your own page rank in the various search engines. I'm not sure if this would be considered a black hat seo page rank technique, but it might work. What do you think?; Oh yeah and, would you link to exchange links? I am looking for SEO sites to link up with.

Dilip Mutum said...

It might work if these free blogs are regularly updated and maintained as separate blogs. If these blogs are one post ones without any updated content, I don't think it will work in the long run.

Dilip Mutum said...

Thanks for the buzz and the link. Tried to log in and leave a comment on your site but somehow didn't receive any confirmation email. Anyway, I have added you to my blogroll.