What: “Black Hat SEO” is the term for deviant behavior in relation to Search Engine Marketing. The general rule is any behavior that breaks the official guidelines published by Google can be called Black Hat. In reality, any unethical method to improve SERP rankings is usually deemed Black Hat.

Why: The most common uses for Black Hat methods are financial gain (spam marketing, quick stat building, etc.),  the classic “Google Bomb” (rigging the results page to show certain results for a specific term that isn’t organically related), and finally for the purpose of going “viral”. It should be noted that none of these are guaranteed by using Black Hat methods.

Over the course of time I’ve been talking with people about these techniques and methods, almost everyone has looked down upon the Black Hat users. Interestingly enough, however, when getting into more detail I discovered that many people are using these methods, usually by accident. They go off search for unique ranking ideas and end up falling victim to unethical procedure. The largest issue when dancing with fire is that there isn’t a defined line between “safe” and “pushing too far”, It’s all up to chance. That being said, there is a clear list of items that most everyone agrees are “Black Hat”, steer clear of the following;

• Doorway pages – Showing a different page for a search engine than your human users.
• Hidden Text – Using formating to show text to search engines only, usually done with keywords.
• Keyword Stuffing – Tossing your keywords in every chance you can simply to appear higher in results.
• Empty Pages / Spam – Pages with no actual content of interest to a human user, only used to improve ranking.

You may be thinking to yourself, “Well hey, I don’t do any of that!”, and you may be incorrect. For example, if you own a forum running modern software you have the ability to allow the “bot” group to view certain areas and disallow human guests from doing the same. This can be classified as a doorway page by some, others simply say It’s unethical. Either way, if you put yourself in situations like these you open yourself up to being banned from search engines. If you’re going to continue dancing with fire regardless, I wish you the best of luck, don’t get yourself burnt.

About the Author
Leo Ghost has been in the web development industry for six years, owning multiple forums, topsites, static content sites, working as a paid posting agent, and even has his own dedicated team working for him. He may be contacted at his personal site; Pirated.me. Currently operational network sites include Top Forums. Keep up to date on network happenings via @Bitcove.

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