Blogs are deemed to be highly important in the online business; hence people come up with different techniques in order to have them optimized by search engines. But we all know that not all SEO techniques can bring about quality results, hence there’s the white hat, gray hat and black hat SEO. While black hat SEO techniques are highly discouraged by experts mainlBlack Hat SEO Techniques commonly found in Blogs
Blogs are deemed to be highly important in the online business; hence people come up with different techniques in order to have them optimized by search engines. But we all know that not all SEO techniques can bring about quality results, hence there’s the white hat, gray hat and black hat SEO. While black hat SEO techniques are highly discouraged by experts mainly because they can cause peril to both sites and blogs, still a lot of bloggers use these ideas in order to make their blogs work and get noticed.
Here are the common black hat SEO techniques used on today’s blogs:
1. Cyber Hoaxing.
When “sensationalizing” is the term used in creating and exaggerated news report or feature articles in print and broadcast journalism, cyber hoaxing meanwhile is the name for doing the same thing in the world of blogging. Yes, the art of making a sensational write up over a topic that needs to be based on facts and valuable information is a form of black hat SEO. This is because you mislead your readers in understanding the topic of your discussion. Cyber hoaxing also paves more opportunities for blatantly promoting your ads, which both readers and search engines would find very annoying.
2. Link Buying
Another common black hat SEO technique used by bloggers is link buying. Just the same as vote-buying, you purchase links in order to increase your value in search engine algorithms. The links you bought do not actually function; they just exist because you purchased them.
3. Using hidden text
The third highly used black hat SEO is using hidden text. These are keywords visitors do not see mainly because they blend in the background color theme. Since they are invisible to the eyes of readers, they can be accidentally clicked and redirect users to the ads. Hidden text can be read by search engine crawlers though.
4. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a method done to make great use of certain web pages by using a security flaw. This is a truly wicked black hat SEO technique since you will be able to create misleading URLs to the sites you assign them to, by using the anchor text in which they are to be placed. The links you create will be the ones followed by search engine crawlers, thus getting the indexed XSS-generated page.
5. Article spinning
Article spinning is a technique used by bloggers especially when they are running out of content to write. By this you grab articles from other websites, rewrite and try to generate new ideas from it, yet at the same time you insert links to the sites you promote. Also, these articles may contain other ads such as Adsense, in order to generate income from the content. Article spinning is probably the easiest black hat SEO technique since all you need is a writer who can write or rewrite articles for you-and that’s what most blog and website owners do nowadays.
6. Splogging
When white hat SEO promotes blogs and mini blogs, black hat SEO on the other hand has its own version of the deed-splogs. Splogs are just like mini-blogs, except that they contain senseless content. Splogs are made to automatically generate senseless content from the RSS feeds they read. The content generated by splogs contains links to ads, and are also used to have other sites indexed or increase their page ranking. Unless you get to examine the content carefully, it is difficult to determine which blogs are splogs these days, since a lot of splogs have already proliferated over the web.
These are only among the different techniques that fall under black hat SEO which are common in blogs. While they are highly discouraged by blogging experts, still, a lot of bloggers use these methods in order to increase their page ranking and to fully market their ads. It is quite difficult not to use even only one of these methods on to your blog because they do bring about significant effects at a shorter period of time. You can even find some web developers incorporating these techniques on to your blog.
Word of advice: when using any of these methods, it is important that you know when and where to use them, as well as the consequences they can give you in the long run. Indeed black hat SEO brings instant changes that improve your blog, but after a while they may backfire and end up having your blogs closed, may because no one visits them anymore, or search engines have already put an end on your schemes. Hence, it is still recommended that you follow white hat SEO techniques and focus on quality content, so that you will keep your blogs alive and healthy, have a steady flow of targeted traffic, and keep friendly relations with search engines.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:38 am
Wow! I seriously never knew that! But for sure I never use any of them…yet….
December 7th, 2008 at 5:56 am
There are 6 items in that list..
December 7th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
I think now-days blackhats tend more to sway towards mini-sites / splogs / automated sites as a way to ‘launder’ links to their ‘money sites’
December 8th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Often you are using black hat SEO in their projects?
December 9th, 2008 at 9:54 am
I never heard of XSS. I think it's really an advanced method that few bloggers actually use. And the hidden text, that's a classic
December 10th, 2008 at 2:26 am
I'm not sure which is worse hidden text or 100 blatant keywords in black text. Actually I think splogs are cool.
December 10th, 2008 at 11:19 am
I think link buying and article spinning are somehow not so black, lol
December 10th, 2008 at 11:27 am
It's so true.. Especially hidden text..It's really black black hat..
December 10th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Nice article. Actually, Google is good at catching people who try to cheat the system when it comes to hidden text. Having blatantly hidden text (usually just a list of keywords) will actually hurt your page rank, or even ban you from the search engines.
From Google: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answ...
December 11th, 2008 at 4:31 am
I don't really think article spinning is black hat method. After all they somehow modify the content before re-post it. The worst are those who copy straight and do not credit the original content!
December 11th, 2008 at 6:26 am
interesting site it really learns me a lot.
December 11th, 2008 at 6:32 am
great post i really like that.
December 11th, 2008 at 10:50 am
I can't believe it when I stumble across a site that has hidden text, especially when it doesn't look like it was designed in 1995!
December 12th, 2008 at 2:23 am
also, some seo black hat'ers use a different content for search engine (the spam ones) and another version is for normal view. they must have some kind of code to detect search engine bot.
and about you #5 point, most webmaster will use it (article rewriting or copywriting). Its a great technique when you didn't have resource for the article you want to write.
December 12th, 2008 at 7:03 am
I can't believe it when I come across a site that uses hidden text and it doesn't look like it was made in 1995… Occasionally it happens though. You can tell you're on one when there is a large blank area in the footer – drag your cursor over that and highlight the text.
I also didn't see a mention of cloaking – showing different text to a search engine than what the visitor sees, usually determined by IP address.
December 13th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
These techniques are illusory.
December 17th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Hi ,
The information about the black hat process are great . But I need more information about the present trends of black hat process if you can help me.
December 20th, 2008 at 6:44 am
Seriously, people still use the white font on white background technique? Unbelievable! I thought that was gone long ago. Never heard of the XSS thing — very interesting.
December 24th, 2008 at 7:38 am
There are so many things about SEO that I do not know I am glad that you present different ways to look at SEO
January 7th, 2009 at 10:40 am
your title said 5. But in the content I found six item. But, it's a good bonus anyway
January 8th, 2009 at 4:48 am
I can now see why black hat is not that popular. However the #5 about article spinning the only way that you would get caught doing this would be if you were just copy/pasting that stuff in instead of retyping it out the old way without copy/paste. Not to say I have ever done that before, maybe on a book report, but it was more of an observation than anything.
Good post
March 28th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Can you tell me,pls,why article spinning is black?
Thanks,
Andy
April 5th, 2009 at 1:33 am
excellent article i loved the 5 black hat strategies you listed i know many people that continue to use article spinners and its funny because many of their blogs that have been article spun make absolutely no sense which to me really hurts your blogs overall popularity to both the search engines and your readers
April 24th, 2009 at 3:10 am
well buddy doing any black hat techniques can be very beneficial and great but only for the short time you do it but once you get caught performing any of the above mentioned strategies you will certainly get penalized by the major search engines and your search engine rankings will certainly decrease as well as you possibly getting banned from the search engines as well
August 27th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Article spinning always seems to be a strange idea to me. I know there is a duplicate content penalty, but why not simply submit the same article to multiple directories? Are you really getting penalized for that? Doubtful, otherwise you could do the same to your competitors
November 6th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
I've watched more than one website crash and burn due to excessive hidden text. One of our client's competitors seemed to push it a little too hard and the site completely disappeared from SERPS. It took several months before that site reappeared after that junk content was removed.
January 4th, 2010 at 10:16 am
Brilliant post about SEO. I’m honestly stupefied that it hasn’t been stated earlier.
January 23rd, 2010 at 6:48 pm
Hey man, i wanted to let you know that i’m giving for free a very intresting ebook made by a friend of mine. It is a cool report that also includes 2 videos of about 20 minutes about how to promote your blog the guru way. Working methods are presented the easy way for all the bloggers and webmasters that want to learn how can they rank high into google and other search engines. Good luck and have fun!