Posted by JeffBeale

“There are two sides to every coin”; the popular adage goes. SEO is not an exemption; hence, we have black hat and white hat SEO strategies. (Excuse the color codes; it’s not related to anything outside SEO.)

Let’s differentiate the two SEO techniques; white hat refers to those prescribed by Google to raise page rank and traffic; these are respected by the webmasters’ community.  Opposite to this is the bogus (hence evil) side of SEO which is black hat. These are techniques that fool Google bots and spiders for their sites to rank high; it goes with one name: cheating. More often this leads to having one’s site banned from Google and other search engines.

 Here are some of the popular black hat SEO strategies used by these traitors, with or without your knowledge.

 Hidden Text- This ploy is that of placing keywords on the site in the same color as that of the background to escape Google’s prying eyes.

Selling High-Page-Rank Sites- This is what happens when web masters turn into salesmen as they sell their high-PR sites, no matter if they are relevant or not.

Link Farms- These are web sites that contain nothing else but free-for-all links, which means total nonsense, not even comprehensible; linking to these sites will cause you a Google penalty or ban.

Copy-and-Paste Content- This is what they call that double-crossing strategy of maintaining two web sites with the same content. Usually a webmaster launches a new site and uses exactly the same content from a still-existing old domain, utilizing the copy and paste function.

Doorway Pages- Are very-keyword-enriched web pages that actually contain only spam; these pages connect to a web site, with relevant information which the owner wants to promote.

Spiderweb Linkage- Another webmaster maneuver is to have multiple sites with the same content; and worst of all, they link to one another in a spiderweb manner.

Like the blackness of dark chocolate, black hat SEO is so tempting that it takes a lot of guts to resist it. It helps when you think that once you give in, you may lose what you’re supposed to have gained.