Introduction

I would firstly like to point out that I would not recommend any webmaster to use any black hat techniques on their site. Although some techniques may get you higher rankings, if you are found out by the search engines they will either penalise your site, or worse, ban your site completely from ever showing up at all in their search engines.

What is Black Hat

Black hat are techniques that are used to help boost your rankings that the search engines do not like. There are many black hat techniques that people do and I will go over some below.

Keyword stuffing

The Keyword meta tag used to be a high ranking factor years ago but SEOs used to abuse them to gain higher rankings. Keyword stuffing is repeating a lot of keywords, both on your page and in your meta titles to try and achieve better rankings.

As the search engines look at a sites content to see if that site is relevant  for a given keyterm/phrase they look to see if that word(s) is/are mentioned on that page. If a page mentions “dog collars” a lot then it must be relevant for that term.

With this being a ranking factor some SEOs will over use this keyterm on the page to try and boost that page, using this technique can drop your rankings rather than improve them and it is also bad for visitors as they do not want the term “dog collars” repeated every 4 words as it does not read well and it is very off putting

Hidden Text

This techniques was also bigger years ago more than it is today, it can also be linked with keyword stuffing. As people do not want sites with over used keyterm people sometimes put their keyterms hidden on their page so you are unable to see them but the search engines can, this techniques is used to try and trick both you and the search engines.

Hidden text is hidden by either making the text the same colour as the background or setting the font size to 0. Hidden text is usually used at a bottom of a page on a white background. Hidden text however does show up on the page source and search engines are easily able to detect hidden text now.

Link Farms

Link farms are just websites with loads of random links on them and serve no informational purpose at all, they are used to try and boost rankings.

Bad Neighbourhood Sites

Linking to a bad neighbourhood site typically with a reciprocal link can hurt your ranks, what bad neighbourhood means is, if a site is doing something that Google does not like and you link to them Google may think that you are involved or you would have not linked to them.

Cloaking

Cloaking is given to the technique where one page is given to the search engines and a different one is given to the visitors. This technique is used to help pages rank for terms they would not normally rank for and help boost your rankings.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are pages  that are keyword rich and their purpose are just to send visitors to a different page that you want them to go to. They are created for the search engines and usually read very badly and include many keyterms in a specified niche to try and rank that page higher. A “click here” or meta refresh HTML is also used.

Content Scrapping

This is used for people who do not write their content for their websites, they just go out and steal other peoples and mash it up and try and make it their own, this goes into the duplicate content issue and if your websites content is simply all copied your site will not rank, but the original source will.

Grey Hat Techniques

These techniques are between white and black hat, some SEOs use them and some stay clear of them.

Auto Software

Some SEOs use automated software to build up links to a site, these kind of softwares are used to save time and may get lots of links to a site, but are of poor quality so offer little success. Blog posting and article submissions are just a few.

White Hat

Using white hat techniques are essential for better search engine visibility and to make sure your site never gets banned/penalized. Following the following rules are a must.

Google - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Yahoo - http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html

You need to make sure any techniques mentioned in the “black hat” section are not used on your site and the search engine’s guidelines are followed.