Posts Tagged ‘unethical techniques’

Why to Use White Hat SEO Instead of Black Hat SEO

posted by MarbellaSEO 4:54 AM
Thursday, March 26, 2009

Getting in the top in search engines is very hard job. If you are targeting high competitive keywords it may take a long time to get into top 10. In this situation many webmasters have a dilemma — continue with white hat SEO or try some dirty tricks? Let’s have a look at advantages and disadvantages of both solutions.

There are one basic advantage and disadvantage of white hat SEO. You don’t risk penalization but it needs quite a long time to succeed. On the other hand black hat SEO can speed up the process. But there are some very strong reasons why never use black hat tactics:

1. Black hat is not ethical. In other words it is pure cheating. If the ethics is not argument for you continue reading the other reasons.

2. If you use hidden text you will be probably reported by your competitors. It is not difficult to find the hidden text on the page. Just press CTRL + A and you will see everything including the hidden text. Every page can be also explored using “view page source” function.

3. Spamming the weblogs and forums doesn’t work in the long run. It cannot be called regular link building method. Most of these links will be deleted in a few hours or days. Good forums have moderators who can delete spam very quickly. Weblog comments are usually moderated so the spam will never appear on the site. And most of the blogs which are not moderated have nofollow attribute. It means the links from such websites are ignored by search engines. The remaining links which can have some positive SEO impact will be deleted as soon as the site owner find them. If you get a lot of such links which will be deleted in a few days or weeks Google will think you are buying links and it can hurt your SE ranking.

With good SEO strategies you can expect a lot of visitors which will come to your website and earn you good money. To get the highest conversions your site should load as quickly as possible because your visitors will leave it if they will need to wait too long. Good uptime is also very important. You will not make single sale if your website is down. For this reason many webmasters recommend web hosting from MarbleHost.com.

What is Black Hat SEO?

posted by MarbellaSEO 8:42 AM
Friday, March 20, 2009

Black hat is a common term known to search engine optimisers, it is considered as unethical techniques used to get websites increased exposure in search engines.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN wants to ensure they are showing relevant results to their end users. For those who employ successful “Black hat” or “Unethical” techniques to get their sites to show up in the search results pages, more often than not, will not give you the information you were looking for.

For example, if a Webmaster wants to make money with Google Adsense, they place content on a webpage in the hope that when someone finds that page, they will click on an Ad because the content on the page is not useful. In return, the Webmaster gets paid for that click.

The result is poor user experience because of the black hat SEO techniques used by the Webmaster to fool the search engines into believing the page was relevant to the search.

This is exactly what search engines are trying to combat.

If you are a person who is hoping to outsource search engine marketing, then it is important you know what to look out for and avoid when trusting someone with your website.

Here are some common Black hat techniques:

Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing can be achieved in a number of ways. It is an unethical technique of using tags such as Meta-tags, Alt tags and title tags to stuff with your target keywords. Search engines reads these tags and can help to indicate what a page is about, however, if you stuff your tags with keywords, and the search engines find out, then this can cause your site to be banned.

An example of keyword stuffing in alt tags (tags attached to images) could look something like:

[img src=”images/my_cat.jpg” alt=”black hat, dodgy practices, black, hat, spam, unethical,hat black,black hat is cool,im spamming for black hat,practice black hat”]

As you can see, the webmaster is wanting the search engines robots to notice the keyword black hat in the hope it will get a better ranking in the results pages, however, this is unethical and something which if picked up, is likely to get the website thrown out of the search engines.

Hidden Text

The most common way to hide text on a webpage is by setting the font colour of the text to be the same as the page background, this way it is not easily picked up by a site visitor.

People use hidden text to load keywords and phrases into a webpage that is only read by search engines to increase their rankings in search engines. However, this tactic goes against search engine guidelines and if picked up, can get your website banned.

One way to discover if a site has hidden text is to click Edit/Select all in your browser, if you see text, which is otherwise not visible, then this is hidden text.

Doorway Pages
A common example of a doorway page is for a Webmaster to create a page specifically for search engines, which probably would make no sense to a user. They will get the page for search engines ranking, and when a user clicks on the result from a search, they will immediately be redirected to a different page without their knowledge.

An easy way to discover a doorway page is to look at the description in a search result and to look for that content when you click through to that page. If the content is not within the page content or in the description Meta-tag, then it is likely the result you saw was a doorway page.

*Note: Google can sometimes use descriptions in their webpage results from DMOZ, check to see if the site is listed in DMOZ and check the description to clarify the description is not from them.

These are the most common techniques used by Black hat Webmasters

All of these methods can get your site banned from the search engines, so when outsourcing SEO work, check over your website to ensure none of these tactics are being used on your website.

Nicola Bullimore has been working as a Search Engine Optimizer for some years. For more information on Search Engine Marketing please visit the LandingNet website

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nicola_Bullimore

 
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