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.