Because of the fierce competition in the industry, some search engine optimization firms began using tactics that the search engines have labeled as “black-hat”, or “illegal”, in the search engine world. Every major search engine (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) has issued rules and guidelines listing several of these black-hat tactics. Failure to comply with these guidelines will most likely get you de-indexed, or worse, banned from the search engines.

Black hat SEO is the intentional misleading of search engines and their spiders. Nothing is worth the risk of being booted out of a search engine index. This is an article on what NOT to do for search engine optimization on your website.

DO NOT DO ANY OF THESE THINGS TO YOUR WEBSITE!

1. Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the intentional overuse of a particular term or phrase in hopes of achieving higher search engine rankings for that term or phrase. The best way to avoid this is to fill your page with text that was written naturally and do not over use your target phrase. Often keyword stuffing leads to sentences sounding funny or awkward. Not only is this deceptive, but your customers will see it and run.

2. Hidden Text

Hidden text is setting the color of text the same as the background of a webpage. By having your text and background the same color, the text or repeating phrases is invisible to human visitors but not search engine bots. Search engines now look for the color of the text and compare it to the color of the background. Some webmasters create a colored image and set it as the background to the page to avoid being detected; this tactic does circumvent the search engines, as they are not able to tell the color of an image, however, your competitors will be quick to report you to the search engines if they find you are using this strategy.

3. Cloaking

Clocking, in short, is intentionally displaying different information to human visitors than to search engines. There are numerous ways of cloaking content, and not all have been determined “black-hat”. Would you be willing to share you tactics with the search engines themselves? Black-hat cloaking will work for a short time, however, you run a high risk of having your domain banned permanently. There are ethical reasons for cloaking and they are not bad if used properly.

4. Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are “landing” pages added to a website to specifically target a keyword or phrase. Often these doorway pages have no value to visitors and only exist to capture the attention of search engines. Doorway pages are added specifically to mislead search engine spiders and will get you removed from an index faster than you can blink.

5. Redirects

Redirect pages have several white-hat (usable) purposes, however, when used as a black-hat tactic – often combined with doorway pages – they serve as a red flag to search engines. Sneaky Redirect pages take a visitor from one page to another automatically and normally are used to guide search engines to page they will like better than the one you send your customer to.

6. Duplicate Site

This is not often used but, when affiliate programs were first gaining in popularity, webmasters would create several copies of the same sales page in hopes that quantity over quality would prevail and they would make a sale from one of their many websites selling a product. With the advancement of search engines, they are able to find excessive duplicate content and will penalize you heavily for it.