Black Hat SEO: Tricks To Avoid

Invisible Text

At one time it was considered good SEO to include your strongest keywords somewhere on your page in hidden text, either with hidden div tags or by turning the text the same color as the background. Now, however, abuse of this technique by shady SEO firms have caused most search engines to classify it as “Black Hat”. If you are doing this, keep in mind it can definitely get you downranked or even banned. This also applies if the text is nearly but not quite the same color. The search engine indexers can still tell.

Keyword Stuffing/Spamming

Keyword stuffing or keyword spam is the practice of creating long lists of keywords and phrases, especially keywords considered to be “high traffic” due to popularity as search terms. This is especially true if the keywords don’t actually relate to the content of the site. One example is using the keyphrase “nude photos” because people believe it’s a popular search term. What they don’t realize is that if you don’t have actual nude photos on your website, you run the risk of having your page downranked or banned for keyword stuffing.  This trick is often used in conjunction with Invisible Text

Multiple Domains (with very different names)

At one time this was a great way to help solidify your search engine presense. You could get “mydomain.com”, “myphotography.com” and “myimages.com” and have them all point to your website. Unfortunately, one of the tricks of black hat SEO is to set up a similar domain name and rip off the content of another site with the intention of pulling some of the existing site’s traffic away. For this reason, search engines now penalize duplicate content. While it won’t necessarily get your main site downranked, it will get all your additional sites removed from the indices.

This isn’t a problem if you want to get multiple versions of the same name, such as “mydomain.com”, “mydomain.net” and “mydomain.biz”..  As long as the “second-level” or name part of your domain is the same, the “top-level” or domain type  extension can be different without penalty. The most common reason for this is brand protection.

Large, generic “Link Exchange” programs

Link exchanging can be good or bad depending on how it’s done. Let’s look at the “wrong way” to do it.

Large link-exchange programs sound good on the surface. Pop a simple snip of code on your splash page or embedded links page and presto, you’re crosslinked to dozens of other sites. Unfortunately many popular link exchange programs are poisoned.

In SEO parlance, “poisoned” means the service has become infiltrated with black hatters or spammers, and the links generated by the link exchange program can no longer be considered safe or ethical. If your link exchanger contains a lot of poison, you can get downranked for having it on your site.

This does not mean all link exchange programs are bad. Remember, the goal to SEO is to provide info humans will find useful. Avoid large generic link exchange programs. Instead, focus on industry-specific link exchanges, especially if they’re available only to members of an industry-specific organization. You may have fewer links into your site with this but they will be quality links and more important – they won’t be as likely to be poisoned.

The important thing to remember with “Black Hat” techniques:

They do not work over the long term. Even if they show modest results in the short term, the search engines will always catch on to them. Sites which use these techniques nearly always end up being removed from organic search results.

Note: It isn’t necessary to fool or trick a search engine to obtain better placement, and attempts to do so will eventually result in your site being downranked or even banned from the search engine.

These are just a few things you can do to help with your site rankings.  Next time we’ll look at some of the other tools – both “paid” and “free” – that PhotoBiz offers which can be used to help your SEO.