Monday, June 21, 2010

Black Hat SEO: The Dark Side of Internet Tweaking

 As in the movies, there are always the protagonists and the antagonists, the good guys and the bad guys. This is also true in the SEO world with the appearance of whitehat and blackhat SEO techniques.

While there are a lot of SEO specialists who endeavor to appropriately optimize their site for it to become audience or reader - centered, there are also breeds of SEO tweakers who followed Annakin Skywalker's lead and treaded the dark side - of Search Engine Optimization that is. These people follow a strategy that is commonly called Blackhat SEO.

Blackhat SEO, according to the webopedia, "refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines rules." The term originated from the popular movies of old, where the antagonist commonly wear black leather jackets or clothes and sport a black hat, in contrast to the main character who usually put on white clothes with matching white hat.

The most prevalent approaches used by Blackhat SEOs include link farming, link buying or selling, placing hidden texts, spamming, cloaking, traffic stealing, redirecting, duplicate content, keyword stuffing, cookie snatching. Explanation of these procedures are discussed here.

These methods may boost your ranking or income but not for a long time. Sites which use blackhat SEO procedures will usually get banned by Google and other major Search Engines. Sites that are optimized through Blackhat techniques are usually 'disposable', meaning, once the search engine learns of the violations that these sites have committed, or if they loses their shine in the page ranks, they are readily forsaken by their creators. .

In end, the readers would know. They can also distinguish between a site that are  useful to them and a site that furnishes internet content that is simply 'empty'.

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