What is Black Hat SEO?

Posted On: November 24, 2008

When most people first encounter the question, “What is black hat SEO?” they seem to be asking two things—what does SEO stand for and why is it called “black hat”. To answer the first question, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a technique carried out by most Internet entrepreneurs and web content engineers to help their websites rank higher in search engine queries. The term “black hat” roots from old Western cowboy flicks and the colors of the hats they’re wearing. The villains in these flicks wear black hats while the good guys naturally wear white hats.

Putting this two information together makes answering the question, “What is black hat SEO?” much easier. In a nutshell, black hat SEO is any unethical method of making a website rank higher in search engine listings. But the question about still lies, because we’re still unsure about what is black hat SEO, exactly.   

Detailing the black hat methods

The difference between white hat and black hat SEO techniques used to be clear cut. The main principle behind black hat SEO writing was to produce codes, not message, which could be recognized by the search engine, but are not necessarily meaningful for human readers. Black hat SEO writing is not so much about readable and informative content as it is about packing a page full of clustered keywords in a paragraph, whose sentences may be grammatically correct, but whose entire meaning is not necessarily relevant to the subject matter.

This is very easy to spot in gibberish data which is blatantly composed to be easily “spidered” by search engines. Unfortunately, it did not take long for search engine firms to find out about these methods. They needed to stop black hat SEO methods because it was causing their search engines to list irrelevant web pages, which have nothing to do with the query.

Black hat SEO techniques are highly unethical because they produce “instant” but short-term results, and most of the time they cause the banning of certain domains from prominent search engines like Google. Search engine companies have taken the trouble to make their algorithmic codes more sophisticated to beat these black hat SEO techniques, which cause an annoyance both to search engine programmers and search engine users.

What is a gray hat SEO?

Relevance is a highly subjective concept, and the meaning of certain terms may not necessarily be the same for every individual. This is the reason why some web content which may not necessarily be the most “right on the money” answer to the query remains listed on most search engines. However, because they may not be the most popular “answers”, they are, most of the time, listed on the lower pages of the search engine results.

What are the most popular black hat SEO techniques?

People need to be very careful not to employ web content engineers who use keyword packing, invisible links, and doorway pages as SEO techniques. These are the most commonly banned SEO techniques in the market, and using these SEO methods can cause you the search engine eligibility of your website’s domain. ­

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Associated tags:  SEO, Marketing, Google, Search Engines, Keywords

Comments:

Improve Google Rankings wrote on March 13, 2012 at 10:47
Ahhh another great post from you. Been reading your site for a long time right now.
:-)