Black Hat SEO

In the ongoing quest to improve a website's search engine positioning, PageRank and overall traffic flow, webmasters and business owners often take an "anything goes" approach. The result is black hat SEO, or the dark side of search engine optimization.

Loosely defined, black hat SEO incorporates any tactic that is purposely deployed to fool the search engines into giving you a higher rank or value. There is a huge variety of ways to go about this, and there are also rather famous examples of major corporations employing some of these methods.

The benefit of using black hat SEO is that you can quickly boost your search engine positioning and the amount of traffic you receive. From there of course, its still up to you to convert those visitors but the point is you can significantly enhance your ability to attract visitors to begin with. The negative of black hat SEO is that when you get caught - and in most instances, you will get caught - you could be blacklisted or banned from the indexes of search engines altogether, which means you won't appear at all.

There is nothing illegal about what you're doing with black hat SEO... that is unless you are manipulating another company's code or stealing someone's money or data in some kind of scheme. Therefore, there is no "Google Police Force" that will show up knocking on your door with a search warrant. However, the consequences can still be serious for your online business, as your presence in the search engines could disappear altogether.

Black Hat SEO Examples

One of the simplest forms of black hat SEO is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is jamming as many different keywords, as many times as you can, into the content of your page. A slightly more tricky form of keyword stuffing involves the use of "invisible" text. What that means is text in the same color as the page background, so to visitors it doesn't appear, but the search engines would still recognize its presence.

A link farm, a very specific type of link building, is another example of a black hat SEO tactic. While it can be done on all scales from tiny to massive, a link farm is a collection of unrelated websites created or enrolled with the sole purpose of linking to one another, and therefore driving up PageRank.

Another example of black hat search engine optimization is selling PageRank. The whole concept of PageRank, simplified as much as possible, is that when one site links to you, you get a piece of that site's credibility or rank. If the site has a high rank, you get a lot of value. Therefore some webmasters have taken to "selling" PageRank by selling links on highly ranked pages to websites looking to get the resulting PageRank boost.

There are of course other, more complex examples of black hat search engine optimization. For example you can serve different versions of your website to different visitors - namely one version to human visitors and one version to search engine spiders that crawl and rank pages.

How to Avoid Going Black Hat

An important thing to note is that there are no hard and fast rules for what classifies as black hat versus white hat. It's a fine line between white hat and black hat SEO in some instances. If you have to wonder about what you're doing, it's probably classified in the black hat realm. However it can be difficult navigating that boundary.

If you're afraid of keyword stuffing or employing any unintentional black hat SEO, you could always hire an SEO content writer for your website. Additionally, if you hire an SEO company to handle all aspects of your online promotion and marketing, be sure to look into their reputation, clients and history. Another tool at your disposal is the official Google SEO starter's guide, which can help you determine what may or may not fit into accepted strategy.

Ultimately though, part of the fun - or the eternal struggle - of search engine optimization is that there is no single way to succeed and there is no clear right/wrong or success/failure division. For every person that eagerly follows every word of a prominent SEO blogger like Matt Cutts, you'll find another person scoffing at what is said. But when it comes to black hat SEO, it's caveat emptor; you're on your own.