Black Hat SEO –Pirates of the Internet

Any website owner worth their server space knows what SEO is. It’s an important tool to getting your space in the big “world wide web” out there and getting your target audience. Most times what you hear or learn about is White Hat SEO. Thus since you already know what that is (I assume hehe) …here I shall attempt to explain what Black Hat SEO is all about. It’s not illegal but the practices are meant for an unscrupulous villain or in more romantic contexts the renegade with the black hat…

Any Tom, Dick and Hari can buy a domain and make a website but it takes a most insidious heel to optimize it with black hat techniques. The basic idea is to fool Google, Yahoo and whichever search engine to make money off adsense and whatever advertising tools a website makes money off. The risk is low in the sense that all that happens is that your domain gets banned. At 250 rs a month or so it’s nothing compared to the short term rewards. The man who owns the website can have several websites at a go operating on Black Hat principles and stealing away viewers and affiliates from legitimate websites. How is it done??? Well first you drown your morals in a spoon of water and then you sell you soul to the internet devils …but enough of my philosophy lets learn what Black Hat SEO with a quick glance at my top ten picks of Black Hat techniques that shall simplify the concept for you.Keyword stuffing –It is the practice of putting text with keywords in sizeable amounts. This plays off the search engine which when one enters a search term will give you results based on keyword count, variety, and density. This worked because older versions of indexing programs simply counted how often a keyword appeared and gave out rankings. There is a proper way of doing this so you can forget about copy pasting to infinity also Google and other search engines can now detect Keyword stuffing by comparing it with other sites for keyword density and such. This technique is dead more or less…

Hidden or invisible unrelated text - Hidden or invisible unrelated text - Keywords and phrases are made invisible by making the text and the background of the same color. The font can be made miniscule or hidden within the html to drive users to the site. However if you get caught your site will be banned but then you can always make another one. This technique is also Black hat history and no longer in vogueScraper sites –These bad boy sites are a big mix of content mashed from other sites so that the user ends up generating revenue for the Adsense on the site. The way the content is changed and shown is unique but the content is not original. The content is stolen by “Scrapper” programs steals content from sites with high page rankings and thus steals their viewers by taking their search ranks. It is used and is in practice, so beware website owners…

Article spinning

This is a takeoff on Scraper sites where the same content is rehashed to look fresh. This avoids the penalties that content stealing can incur. You can rewrite it by using a human writer or automate the entire process using a thesaurus database or a neural network and thus save time or you can call Anu Malik or Pritam and they can give you additional tips …

Link spam

Link your site to every site that has great ranks. Link spam takes the “mickey” out of link-based ranking algorithms. The more other highly ranked websites link to your black hat site the better your ranking content be damned start linking.

Buying expired domains

If your taste runs to low tech solutions then this one is for you. All you need to do is monitor DNS records for domains that will expire soon. Then buy them when they expire and replace the pages with links to your pages and watch the money flow in. Google resets link data on expired domains putting a monkey wrench in your PayPal account but this works.

Cookie stuffing - An affiliate makes money if you drive a customer to a site and they make a buy you get a cut or a percentage in either goods or cash.. The cookie that a Black Hat uses needs to be an affiliate tracking cookie that is placed on a website visitor's computer without their knowledge. Any revenue that was supposed to go to someone else now goes to you. Ta da!!! Now you can Have your cookie and eat it too. Especially when you look at the size of sales made through affiliates which ranges in the Billions$$$$. Cookie stuffing can be used in conjunction with other techniques to generate more revenue.Comment spam - Web pages that allow dynamic user editing such as wikis, blogs, and guestbooks are potential victims to this technique. Add your links instead of comments and watch the money flow in

Mirror websites –Creating clones of your site with similar content in terms of ideas with different urls, foxes search engines into giving you rankings. Placing keywords in the url will get higher rankings with some search engines (I have no idea which search engine though, you need to research some more on this).

URL Redirection- It is a technique where you are taken to other websites without your actually clicking on anything. You are literally hijacked to the site to create more clicks for the site.

Google Bomb- It is a mix of the techniques I have mentioned in combinations used as to make a certain site rank higher for a particular search word. E.g. the search word miserable failure would produce George Dubya Bush’s official page until the government noticed it and had it changed…Usually humor oriented the same technique can be applied to outrank legitimate sites.All in all the techniques exploit loopholes in the search engines algorithm and logic and most geeks are of the opinion that they exist to be exploited. If short term gains are your thing then by all means go ahead, but a legitimate website will last longer and pay more in the long run. The Black Hat techniques will forever evolve as the search engines get smarter and more complex; there is no end to it. The list here is not complete; I chose the techniques based on what appealed to me in terms of how innovative and simple they were. The more complex techniques involve quite a bit of learning. By the way Ask, Bing, Yahoo and Google control 99% of the search market, your SEO might want to keep that in mind Black hat or not.

Photo Courtesy:

www.digitalmilitia.com

www.undergoogle.com

www.wackywednesdaysale.com

money.bigbucksblogger.com

leodimilo.com

References :

Wikipedia

seoblackhat.com

blackhatseodiary.org

www.blackhat-seo.com

www.syndk8.com

About me:- I am a Content Writer and a Voice & Accent trainer. I also moonlight as an arm chair political thinker and economist. My views are usually cynical (take no heed) and hopefully enlightening. My views are mine and solely mine and in no way shape or form reflects the stance, leanings or ideology of yourstory.in