When ignorant website owners and corrupt companies providing services for SEO are desperate to attain high page ranking in search results; they adopt various unscrupulous tricks to tweak results of search engines. Such malpractices in SEO campaign is termed as Black Hat SEO. Good SEO is about high quality content, carefully selected keywords, tags and building quality links. It may take some time for this whole process to show result. Black Hat SEO tricks promise quick result that may ultimately spell doom for a site.
Here are some commonly adopted Black Hat SEO techniques:
Keyword stuffing is the most widely used tricks of Black Hat SEO. Carefully selected keyphrases and keywords inserted within an article, along with relevant terms are good for SEO purpose. One of the prime sins committed by black hat SEO is to sacrifice quality of content for achieving high page ranking (PR). The idea is to stuff keywords and keyphrases, unnecessarily in description, title and main body of the site, for artificially attracting spiders. This method may work temporarily to increase flow of traffic. However, when the visitors find the contents irrelevant, they leave within seconds. Search engines often pick such tricks easily and ban the site.
Another technique adapted in black hat SEO is using shrewd web design practices to hide content from users but not from search robots. In this way they use quality content for their visitors but set aside keyword dense hidden content for the spiders to index. This may be done by manipulating variety of tags used in website HTML. Sometimes the text is made extremely small or to the same color of background. Search engines view these activities as serious offense and either penalize or ban them when found guilty.
Manifestation of black hat SEO has got new dimension with gateway page concept. A gateway or bridge page of a website is set up to be noticed by search engines algorithms, at the cost of content quality. This may sound similar to keyword stuffing but in this case the idea is to provide links and redirect the visitors to the target page or site. Many such gateway pages are generated for particular keywords or keyphrases. When search engines find these pages or sites they relegate them or the entire domain in their search results.