What is Black Hat SEO?

Many search engines, like Google, MSN, and Yahoo, publish policies and guidelines. These kind of explain what they think to be proper and improper SEO techniques.

Most webmasters think that if you follow these guidelines, you are safe and defimitely not using black hat SEO.

Unfortunately these guidelines are really vague and non-specific.

Also, the guidelines are different for each search engine. For example, if you should move your page, Google likes you to use a 301 redirect and Yahoo wants you to use a doorway to let your visitors know about your new address.

Here are some common ways to define it:

a) Unnatural Rankings

Here the idea is that if a page ranks higher than it would naturally, without tinkering, just for it's own normal appearing keywords, you are practicing Black Hat SEO.

What exactly is "ranking unnaturally high" No one knows.There is no definition. By this definition just about everyone practicing SEO is practicing black hat SEO.

b) Visitor Value

This concept maintains that anything that doesn't add value for your visitors is black hat SEO.

Here we are looking at hidden text, keyword stuffing, doorway pages and so on.

The Visitor Value theory encourages good website design. If you do things that are black hat according to this category you can rise in SERPS but you will get no natural incoming links and your visitors will never return.

c) Property Rights

Here the idea is that whatever you do with your own site is fine,as long as you have to leave other people's sites be.

That means that anything you want to do on your site is no one's business, but you can't do things to other people's blogs or guestbooks or message boards etc. Personally I don't like this definition, but I am not going to argue any points here.

 

Black Hat Marketing Series

  1. What is Black Hat SEO
    How to identify black hat search engine optimization and how to avoid it.
  2. Grey Hat is the Old Black Hat
    What SEO tactics used widely in the past by Webmasters, have now lost their usefulness.
  3. It's a Search Engine Optimization Jungle Out There
    SEO schemes and scams to be knowledgeable and aware of, so you do not get taken advantage of.
  4. Black Hat SEO or Search Engine Spamming
    SEO schemes and scams to be knowledgeable and aware of, so you do not get taken advantage of.
  5. Black Hat in the Gambling Industry
    SEO schemes and scams to be knowledgeable and aware of, so you do not get taken advantage of.
  6. Are YOU Being Negatively Affected by Black Hat Site
    SEO schemes and scams to be knowledgeable and aware of, so you do not get taken advantage of.
  7. Why not use white hat SEO?
    SEO schemes and scams to be knowledgeable and aware of, so you do not get taken advantage of.