Coined from spam and index, Spamdexing is the practice of including information in a Web page that causes search engines to index it in some way that produces results that satisfy the spamdexer but usually dissatisify the search engine providers and users. When the extraneous information appears in a page’s meta tags, it is called “overstuffing”.
Black Hat SEO is tempting to use. It often brings with it quick results and is especially useful if one wants to make quick money from ones internet marketing efforts. The long term problem is that the site once identified as having Black Hat SEO techniques applied will be banned by the search engines.
Some of the techniques to avoid are keyword stuffing. This involves the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety and density of the page. Packing long lists of keywords and no other content onto a site will get that site penalised eventually by search engines.
A further SEO technique that is frowned upon is invisible or hidden text. This is textual content which your visitors cannot see, but which is still readable by the search engines. It is most often executed by having white text on a white background, using a tiny font size or hiding them within HTML code such as ‘no frame’ sections, ALT attributes and in ‘no script’ sections.
The idea is to load a Web page with keywords and keyword phrases that would be unsightly to visitors but that would improve the page’s rankings in the search engine results, and to do so without letting your visitors see the text Hidden text is identified as search spam, as part of spamdexing, by each of the major search engines.
A third black hat SEO practice is using gateway or doorway pages. This involves creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results, but serve no purpose to visitors looking for information. A doorway page will generally have “click here to enter” on the page.
These doorway pages are also known as bridge pages, portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names. Doorway pages that redirect visitors without their knowledge use some form of cloaking.
Setting up scraper sites is a further Black Hat SEO method. Scraper sites, also known as ‘Made for AdSense’ sites, are created using various programs designed to “scrape” search-engine results pages or other sources of content to create “content” for a website. That is using content from other sites without permission.
The specific presentation of content on these sites is unique. It is merely an amalgamation of content taken from other sources for the sole purpose of running advertising on the site mostly the pay-per-click format. The purpose may also be to direct users to other sites.
Link farms are considered part of the spamdexing or Black Hat SEO practices. This involves creating tightly-knit communities of pages referencing each other. In this family of SEO practices are also spam blogs or also known as splogs, page hijacking and cookie stuffing.
Further unethical bahviour for SEO practices are mirror websites, URL redirection and cloaking which refers to any of serveral means to serve a page to the search-engine spiders that is different to what the human users read it as.
As the internet develops and matures there will be knew practices that will fall foul of search engine companies. The internet marketer needs to be constantly aware of what is perceived to be ethical and what can make him fall out with Google et al.
