Black Hat SEO Techniques
Black hat SEO techniques are SEO methods that are generally frowned upon as they achieve quick but very short term gains. What website owners should be concerned with is steady, long term results. The reason we do not promote these black hat tactics, is because they are likely to get you kicked off search engines (including Google!) and in some instances, will result in a permanent ban.
To help you understand more about these negative SEO techniques, and to help recognise them, we have included what we consider the top 3 worst black hat techniques used out there by some SEO companies.
Link Farms
Do not be tempted to buy into an automated back link scheme. Bad quality links from spam websites can be harmful if the directories or websites these links are coming from have not been vetted. A sudden rush of poor quality back links can be harmful to your rankings.
Link farming is different from link building which involves identifying highly relevant websites and respectable business directories that have been checked and verified to make sure they have a page rank. FirstFound is careful to vet back linking sites carefully, to ensure they have a page rank and are relevant to a client’s website, which in turn will help with their rankings.
If you are in doubt about any particular site, simply ask yourself : ‘is this site helpful to someone?’. A useful business directory is fine, but if you try clicking a few links and find yourself going in circles, unable to find anything meaningful, you probably have a link farm!
Cyber Hoaxing (also known as Fake News Feeds)
This is a relatively new method that has started to gain in popularity. Cyber Hoaxing is a way of creating fake news articles on fake news sites and then linking them back to your site. This method is simply a negative SEO technique because you are attempting to fool the search engine by making it believe you have a large amount of relevant links coming back to your website.
Remember that other websites linking back to your site is a positive, as it is basically a vote of confidence that will help search engines see you are popular. However, if these links have been obtained unethically, as with Link Farms or Fake News Feeds, then you are attempting to fool the search engines and you will be penalised, and most likely banned. This is not to be confused with normal article submission with genuine news and offers on a website. If it has an automated feel about it, it is generally not a good idea. The search engines can see the difference between human interaction on the internet and an automated response.
Hidden text
This is by far the most negative SEO technique to date for achieving a high ranking position without thinking of the consequences. This technique involves hiding large amounts of keyword rich content which is unreadable to the average surfer, but the spiders will pick it up.
The major search engines regard this as deceiving them and will get you penalised or banned. A simpler version of this is where they create white keyword rich text on a white background, normally found at the bottom of a page. This can be seen by highlighting all the text on a page. The other common type which is not as easily found is a hidden or cloaked page. These pages are created to fool the search engines who will simply punish you by either dropping your website from the search engine or by pushing you back to the bottom of the listings until you clean up your text.
Simply don’t take the risk!