Black Hat SEO’s rather old school – With solid SEO techniques being utilized to build the credibility of a website with the search engines many SEO experts shy away from black hat techniques.
Some SEO implementers however, still do this especially folks who grab domains and hope to make a buck out of them in the future. Here are some tips on identifying if a website has been optimized using black hat SEO tricks.
Invisible content
This would be mostly textual in nature. If you’ve ever visited a website with a significant amount of empty white space at the bottom of their pages, here’s how you can find out if they’re been tricky.
- Highlight the empty space with your mouse, if text appears highlighted, you’ve just stumbled on a classic technique of black hat SEO. White text written on a white background is so old, it’s like something from the eighties. Or you can just look at the source code to view this section. Typically, this hidden text is full of keywords.
Hiding Content within your code
This is a clever black hat technique. The basic principle of this trick is that within the code for the site there will be content stuffed with keywords. Naturally, this content will not be visible to the end user of the site.
One way of doing this is by using comment tags which developers typically use to add notes or comments within their code explaining what that piece of code does.
- Here’s an example of the comment tag being used correctly,<!– Google Analytics Code –>
- Here’s an example of a comment tag being used incorrectly in a bid to promote a hypothetical page targeting search engine optimisation,<!—Search engine optimisation, SEO, professional search engine optimisation company, spamming search engines –>
Noscript tag
Another popular way of hiding content is the use of the <noscript> tag. The <noscript> tag should be used to inform a user that a script is being used but their browser either doesn’t support the script language used or they have that function turned off.
Here’s an example of the <noscript> tag being used correctly,
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
document.write(“Hello World!”)
//–>
</script>
<noscript>Your browser does not support JavaScript!</noscript>
Here’s an example of the <noscript> tag being used as a black hat SEO technique again in a bid to promote a hypothetical page but this time targeting car hire,
<noscript>
Imaginary Car Hire Firm do Car Hire which is very affordable so if you want to hire a car call our car hire firm because we are the best car hire firm in the world
</noscript>
Other HMTL tags misused in similar ways include the <noframes> tag and hidden inputs in forms.
Content
Content can also be hidden from the end user by using CSS, excessively small text and colored text on the same colored background.
All of these techniques are frowned upon by search engines and if detected can mean your website will be penalized or even banned.
Cloaking
Cloaking is simply displaying one website to visitors and other one to Google’s spiders. The most common way to do this is using the “iframe” redirect code. Many affiliate marketers do this. Thus, your website visitor will see an affiliate website, or what have you, but Google will see only your website, not the affiliate site. Again, Google does not like this, and you will be penalized.
Keyword Stuffing
“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a web page with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
