BlackHat Search Engine Optimization
 

Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science but a continuous process which continues all the way towards ranking top on majority of Search engines and continuous then onwards to remain on top.

The fact remains, though, that search engines were designed for information purposes and they are designed to give its customers the best results and not to help the webmasters to bring in traffic to there websites and so you should design your site in such a manner that when Search engine finds it relevant for its customers and avoid using techniques that are considered spam.

Tricks that can be considered as spams and needs to be avoided are:-

Forums
Unfortunately, some forum participants make comments in forums only in an effort to publish links back to their own sites in signatures. This may be acceptable if the user provides help or assistance to another member but many members just gives no relevant content and increase no of posts and backlinks in there signatures.

Domain Spam
Probably the most popular spam technique today involves creating and hosting a number of Websites. These sites rarely have any intrinsic value other than providing ranking support for the owner's main Website.

Duplicate Domains/Content
More than one domain contains the same content. Now the question arises what is duplicate content. If I display a news ticker from BBC is that considered as duplicate because there may be lots of webmaster who has the same ticker. No its not duplicate but if I copy the same file to two different domains that’s what is duplicate content.

Link Spam and FFA
Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or Page Rank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Irrelevant keyword rich stuffs
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. Don’t use the content rich in word “Microsoft” when you are no where connected to it.

Links in No Script Tags
Links inside comment and other tags like noscript tag which are not displayed on the screens or by text browsers can be considered as spams and should be avoided.

Doorway pages
A web page designed to rank well on a specific search engine for a specific keyword phrase. These pages usually rely on frequent repetition of the keyword phrase, and often try to "trick" search engines into ranking them well.

Less Number of parameters in Dynamic pages
If you decide to use dynamic pages, be aware that not every search engine spider crawl’s dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small.

Web server Configuration
Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Search engines whether your content has changed since Search engine last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

Robots.txt
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Avoid the directories and files that are not relevant to Search engine crawls. This files are files used for user registration, admin panel, etc.

DHTML Layering and Hidden Text
Text hidden by layers of DHTML to increase the keyword density of the keyword on that particular page can cause more harm then we can think of.

Redirects
Avoid using redirects but if redirects are necessary use 301 redirects in .htaccess file. This should be permanent redirect rather than temporary.

Automated Search engine submission tools
Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume lots of resources.

Different Content for Bots/SE
Avoid different sites for bots and users as this can be considered as spams and can be penalized.

Other Miscellaneous stuffs to be avoided

• Tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known web sites
• More than 100 outgoing links keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
• Check for broken links and incorrect HTML.

This article is written by Shabbir Bhimani and is posted at www.go4expert.com

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Re: BlackHat Search Engine Optimization
 

Probably not so effective, as well maintained forums remove useless links.
I am not so sure if you should call this black hat, as there are ton of reasons why duplicates exist. Also copying and pasting is one major contributor to the creation of the web, IMO, so it's tough to debate on this one.

Re: BlackHat Search Engine Optimization
 

Can you explain or support this? Why hidden text can cause harm?

Re: BlackHat Search Engine Optimization
 

The Aim behind the Hidden text is to render the page to the user in a manner that he sees content relevant to him but hiding the text to him means rendering some keyword rich content to the SE bots and so bots relise this as keyword bombing and cause you harm.

Now there are many reasons to have hidden text for menus and the best way to go about it is hide them via JS when the body loads make them hidden and not to generate them via HTML as bot may see that keyword cloaking and cause you harm unnecessarily.

Re: BlackHat Search Engine Optimization
 

shabbir, my question was why you consider that hidden "can cause more harm then we can think of"

I would be interested pure technical justification for this, I know what hidden text is. Just than when you make some statements, you should back them up with explanations ...

Re: BlackHat Search Engine Optimization
 

I explained the same and if you read that you will get the meaning. Repeating it again the hidden text you want to rank higher in SE for some competitive keyword and as Bots realize that they will ban you and so the harm is more than you can think of.

No one can predict how big Giants like google and yahoo will react to hidden text but its the experience with them for some time helps us to give statements like above.

Re: BlackHat Search Engine Optimization
 

Although I agree that most of the discribed methods could be considered as "black", most of the them are the only way to rank the site higher in search engines for free.

Re: BlackHat Search Engine Optimization
 

Thats not true. To rank well in the SE you probably should not be using any of them above or it would be less likely that you will rank well.

Re: BlackHat Search Engine Optimization
 

So, what would you suggest?

Re: BlackHat Search Engine Optimization
 

To avoid the above mentioned things and use proper Search Engine optimization techniques.