Black Hat - Spamdexing

So, there are certain things that you can do yourself in order to get a better SEO rank, but as with everything, there are ways of cheating your way success. Beware though, try any of these methods and subsequently get caught, you run the risk of being booted off Google. BMW Germany is possibly the most famous example for this, as it was caught using ‘black hat’ methods.

So what techniques shouldn’t you do?

Cloaking.
This is a practice which involves serving up one small, human legible dollop of content to a human user, but another, much larger dollop to a search engine. This second dollop can be filled with keywords, links and all manner of spam-like content. Both dollops are indexed as the same page, resulting in a high page rank, but a website will be removed for this.

How, you may well ask, can this be done? The website will read the IP address of the visitor or the User-Agent HTTP header of the browser that is requesting the page and then serve up the necessary dollop.

Cloaking can have legitimate, ethical purposes, as it can be used to serve up appropriate content to users with disabilities or based on geographic location. In general it should be ignored as an SEO method. Flash based sites can be read by Google and other major search engines.

Doorway Pages.
These pages are basically fake pages which exist simply to draw search engine traffic. They draw on a variety of black hat techniques such as hiding text, or using a re-direct to take the user to the proper page. Doorway pages are unethical as they serve no purpose to humans, other than to increase the level of drilling down a user has to do to get to relative content. Remember, most users will want to drill down a maximum of 4 pages to get to the content they want.

Some SEO experts will recommend using Doorway pages, pointing to the ubiquitous ’splash’ pages, reminiscent of old Flash sites. They had to employ Black Hat methods as the FLA couldn’t be indexed, and generally did their job well. Stop and think though - If you are prepared to put this much effort into making a ‘fake’ page rank well, why not channel your energies into making a real page actually work efficiently.
Hidden / Invisible Text.
A popular with early web designers/developers, and still found every now and then. Early HTML programmers used to stuff keyword-rich content onto a page, but make the text exceptionally small or match its colour to the background of the page thus making it invisible to the human eye. This does raise a design concern for the modern designer/developer, as too often text colour resembles the background colour of a page. Bear this in mind when designing your pages.

Modern ways of hiding content from a user include dumping text into a Div layer and setting its visibility to hidden, or position it 10,000px off a user’s visible screen. CSS also allows for other techniques to be used, such as hiding text behind an image by exploiting the z-index.

Major search engines can and do find sites that employ these techniques, so its best to make sure that the visible text you serve up to your visitors is as optimized and relevant as possible.
Keyword Stuffing.
In a different article we discussed how good content can vastly improve your search rank. Unfortunately this can be abused, as pages can overstuff keywords into their content. If Google picks up the same word repeated continually on a page, it may flag up the page and either delist it or relegate it to its supplemental index.

Keyword stuffing also concerns stuffing the meta keyword tag, where multiple keywords are stuffed into the tag. As hardly any attention is paid to the meta tag by major search engines, then all good web masters won’t fall into this trap.
Wikipedia has an excellent entry on this topic.
Link Spam.
This has many forms of abuse. As talked about in an article about good SEO, links to your site are valuable, but avoid links of poor quality. Aim to be linked to by sites which have a high page rank, and may already benefit from a trust rank off Google. Your site will directly benefit from quality links.

Avoid link exchanges and link farms. These are now regarded in the SEO community to be defunct, and have little impact on the ranking of your site. Link to sites that are relevant to your site, and if your content is good, they will reciprocate the link.
URL Redirection.
This is more likely to land your site in the Google Supplemental results list, as the page is likely to be trusted less. Don’t used framed re-directs, or any kind of client side redirect.

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