Black Hat SEO – what you don’t want to do

It is a personal insight, and it can have no coherence with your experience and your discoveries.

Black Hat SEO is simply the call name for some techniques that are used to get higher search engine ranking is an unethical manner (ways that are forbidden by the main search engines). They usually break the current rules and regulations (some of them were permitted some time ago but they became obsolete/forbidden because of the abuse), create poor user experience for the visitors of the site, unethically presents content in different ways (one way for the human visitors and one way for the search engines spiders).

Usually, the Black Hat SEO will provide you short-term gains in better ranking your page, but if you are discovered, you will be penalized by the search engine (reduce ranking or even erasure from the search list).

Some Black Hat SEO techniques to avoid:

• Keyword stuffing: this mean content in your site that is formed only from keywords (long lists) and nothing else. Usually the keywords must be properly inserted into the content, in different parts of the text, in balance with the rest of the words.
• Invisible text for the human visitors: this mean putting text with the same color as the background color, these will not be easy read by the users (it will be read only by accident or by visitors that know what to search on page) but they will be read by the search engine spiders. Also the content of the elements that have as style “display: none” will not be read by the humans but will be read by spiders.
• Doorway pages: it means “fake” pages, usually customized specially for the search engines crawlers (with keywords, tags, titles and everything else), that will never be accessed by the human users, only by spiders. A lot of URLs inside the site means greater ranking, but only when they can be read by everybody (lately the spiders can make the difference between pages-for-all and pages-for-spiders).
• Spam URLs: that means URLs inside your page with little content or not at all. They will be indexed by the spiders, but from the start their values will be very low and, in time, they can get the site down. Lately Google, for instance, puts the accent on the unique content of the site, that’s a very good idea and they will probably get stick with it.

 The conclusion: DO NOT DO that. It might get your site look nice in the beginning, but in time you will lose a lot.