Black Hat SEO, the use of unethical search engine optimization techniques, is something which the SEO community discusses widely and the public remain largely unaware of. This site will give you the information to find out whether your current site, or proposed changes to it by your SEO partner, is within the terms and conditions laid out by major search engines such as Google™, Yahoo!™ and MSN™. These terms and conditions prohibit the use of techniques such as link bombing, textual spamming, cloaking and other unethical search engine optimization methods. Ethical Search Engine Optimization should always conform to these terms and conditions; if you do not, any results you gain for your site and the money you pay for could well be for nothing when the search engines discover how you cheated your way to the top.
Benefits of Ethical SEO
The goal of a search engine is to return documents that are most relevant for a particular search query. Ethical SEO will make your page as relevant as possible for a targeted keyword or set of keywords. Black Hat SEO wills, instead of enhancing the relevancy for a query will use misdirection and obfuscation to gain you traffic. Unfortunately your online business is likely to gain little from this. Ethical SEO will bring you targeted traffic, traffic from people looking newest usa online casinos to buy what you are selling. Misguided and misdirected web traffic is worthless.
Unethical SEO is Bad Internet Marketing
When a user arrives at your site from a Search Engine they expect to find information that is relevanct for the query they have used. If the content they are then presented with is not what they were searching for they will not stay and they will not buy. By giving visitors the information they are looking for you will increase the conversion rate of visitors into customers. By using Unethical SEO it is likely that you could well be losing out on sales to your online competition.
Black Hat SEO
This aunt a cheat sheet so if that what you are looking for go elsewhere. This section covers the main Black Hat SEO techniques that SEO companies have/will/do employ when optimizing sites. By comparing your site against the examples give and then referring to the Search Engine guidelines you can understand what has been done to your site.
Black Hat SEO – Hidden Text
This is an old favorite of Unethical Search Engine Optimization companies and comes in two main ways: the abuse of the no script and no frames tags within sites and background color manipulations. The Search Engine specifically states that hidden text is a bad thing to do. Don’t take our word for it read their terms and conditions.
If you look at the code for your site visit website you may often see that there is content, fully formatted content, in the code flow that does not appear in the browser window. Often this will be in a no script or no frames tag. Unless you have a good reason for the text being in these tags; such as having a JavaScript based menu system that is unspiderable and the content of the tags is an html version of the menu or that your website is in a frameset, it is likely that your website is spamming the search engine using hidden text.
The other favorite is making the text the same color as the background color. Boy is this oldie! Here you can see the content in the code flow it is also often noticeable to users through the fact that at the bottom of the page there will be a large gap.
