Blackhat SEO
- I have heard of blackhat SEO tactics. What are they and how do I prevent them on my website?
Blackhat SEO tactics are simply things you do to a website in the hopes of tricking search engines into giving you better rankings. In 1998, webmasters were finding ways that they could trick search engines into giving their sites better search rankings. Presently, however, search engines have caught on to those tactics and have penalized sites that use blackhat methods. Here is a list of things to watch out for and make sure you are not doing on your site:
- Hidden Text/Links: By changing the color of the text on your site to match the background it blends in and is not readable to the end user but is readable to search engines. People were stuffing keywords into that text in hopes of ranking higher for those keywords.
- Cloaking: Cloaking is showing the end-user one page and the search engines another. The goal was to show search engines a page with lots of nice keyword rich content and send the end-user to somewhere else. Usually that place is where the webmaster can make money.
- Duplicate Content: Years ago, people would duplicate their site's pages hundreds or thousands of times, in hopes of tricking search engines into thinking they have tons of content. Search engines have evolved since then and are able to know if someone is simply copying and pasting the same content on to another page or site.
Ultimately, any time you are trying to deceive search engines or are showing end-users different information than the search engines, it is considered blackhat. There are shades of grey, however, that have been a topic of conversation for people in the SEO field.
- April 14, 2009