Welcome to another essential guide from Roger IT! The Manchester SEO Blog. Today, I will be giving a breakdown of the top 10 most commonly used blackhat Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques, that you should avoid like the plague, and also a very useful Black Hat and White Hat SEO guide you can use to measure just how black or whitehat your techniques actually are.
Keyword Stuffing
It’s probably one of the most commonly used accidental blackhat SEO techniques, yet it always amazes me how often I see it. Be sensible about your keywords! Don’t include words for the sheer sake of it. Believe it or not, it is possible to do this within the page too, not just the ‘head’ of your document.
Hidden Text and Hidden Links
Avoid hiding text at all costs! In fact, I would recommend steering well clear of even slightly similar colours. Anything you need to squint at will probably harm your websites listings in one way or another. This includes making text tiny, moving it off the page using position, or setting display:none in the CSS.
Framesets
As always, framesets should be avoided. Search engines don’t exactly hate them, because they are still in use for various reasons. Some hosting companies will use framesets to forward one domain to another (including big names like 123-reg), but search engines can get themselves stuck within them in some cases and it certainly won’t do you any favours.
When Backlinks Turn into Badlinks
There are a myriad of places to aquire links for your site, and some companies who specialise in link building, some of them good, others will make your domain unusable. The big question is: at what point does link building turn into link farming? A simple but effective rule is – ‘would you click it’? – if the link to your site comes from a relavant page that visitors would find useful in some way, then it will almost certainly be fine.
Duplicate Content, Duplicate Content
Having very small sections of duplicated text won’t be a big problem, because Google knows that people quote each other regularly in blog posts and forums, but make sure the vast majority of your content is your own. A page which is an identical copy of another will be removed from Google’s listings altogether!
Dishonest Server Tricks
Even when you think it might be possible to pull the wool over Google’s eyes, don’t try it! Reconfiguring the server so it never gives error 404, or having hundreds of pages with the same content but dynamically generated key phrases will almost always be found out, even when the URLs of those pages are rewritten to look unique.
As a general rule of thumb – be honest. Google allows you to promote yourself fairly and squarely. If you find yourself in doubt or questioning your actions simply ask yourself the following questions:
Blackhat SEO, Whitehat SEO … How To Tell the Difference!
- Do my actions negatively affect the structure or usability of the Internet? Will it be beneficial to at least one type of user you can think of?
- Are my actions hiding something from (or deceiving) the search engines in some way?
- Do my actions make things difficult for search engines in some way?
If you answered yes to at least two of those questions, think again about what you are doing!!
Tags: backlinks, blackhat seo, duplicate content, framesets, hidden text, keyword stuffing, manchester, manchester seo, search engine optimisation, SEO
“Do my actions negatively affect the structure or usability of the Internet?”
Now some of that’s not necessarily black hat. Cack handed white-hat (crowbarring keywords into a sentence in a way that disrupts readability) can have usability effects though.
Great post though!
lol crowbaring keywords… nice
Good point about the sloppy whitehat.