Following on from Which SEO hat are you wearing? it can be difficult to know which tactics can affect you in which way, particularly for the novice.
For informational purposes, I’m hoping to cover some of the more common tactics of each type of “hat wearer”. I would like to stress that many of these tactics did or can negatively affect your site if you are caught using them. Some people will have great success with them in the right circumstances but these people are fully aware of the right situations to use them and are prepared for the risks associated with using them. I am not advocating (or otherwise) these techniques but I do particularly want to warn people who don’t understand the impact NOT TO USE THEM.
Hidden text
Hidden text is probably the most frequently used tactic by beginners in site design and SEO. The thought process is that you can include keywords and searchable text which will not be visible to your users but will be picked up by search engines. Nowadays this is easily detected as spiders become more style aware and many suggest that you will find yourself easily reported for using this technique. Additionally, users with screenreaders will readily identify what you are doing and will be among the groups of people willing to report you.
Cloaking
Cloaking is basically the act of presenting different information based on the visitor. It was fairly common a few years ago as a useability method for displaying your site in the correct way based on browser version. This was then adopted as an automatic way of presenting keyword heavy, different content to search engine spiders. The danger here is that some users will deliberately present themselves to your site as a search engine spider (googlebot being the most common). When they see what you are doing, they will most likely report you.
Doorways
As a user these are eternally frustrating and no doubt we have all seen them. Nowadays, doorway pages are automatically generated by software. A keyword heavy page is created and indexed. When you type something in google and it’s very obvious that the site itself has no real bearing on the page then it’s probably a doorway. I have found this to be very common in web design pages which are targeted at geographical groups. As a site which does focus on a geographical area, I can type “hungerford web design” and get pages from sites based in areas hundreds of miles away or even in other countries. These pages really annoy me and thankfully they are generally easily detected and removed.
Redirection
In blackhat terms, redirects are used in conjunction with other techniques. Primarily, a redirect would be use to transfer a visitor from a content-less doorway page to a real page containing genuine content. It can be really effective depending on the method used. Again, this is probably fairly defunct as search engine spiders frown on certain types of redirect. The most effective of the redirects probably relies on detecting a user agent and redirecting based on whether it seems to be a spider or a genuine visitor.
Keyword stuffing
In relation to search engine spam, this is probably one of (if not) the most prolific offenders. Keyword stuffing is essentially the practice of creating a very keyword heavy page. It doesn’t really have to make much sense so readibility is often not a consideration. The idea being that of all of the
keywords and phrases included, the spider will identify a good portion of them as useful, thereby creating a greater diversity of searchable phrases. These can be doorway pages and redirection can be applied to create a more useful browsing experience for genuine visitors although it is more common to either put the text in a lower part of the page or to hide the content with
hidden text.
Duplicate sites/content
Employed in different ways there can b a number of reasons for duplicating content. Duplicate content can be detected and removed from listings fairly easily, if done correctly you could have the content of a competitor removed. Equally, you can have multiple instances of your content in a number of sites which differ slightly and threfore can perform differently.
Spamdexing
In essence, spamdexing employs a few of the processes discussed above to manipulate the spider to index based on terms and keywords which bear little or no relation to the main content (if any) on the page. Spamdexing normally features hidden text, keyword stuffing and potentially doorways and redirects as well. In hindsight it’s probably more accurate to discribe spamdexing as the collective name for most blackhat tactics.
Scraper sites
Scraper sites are a little similar to doorway pages. The site software will use search engine results to glean (steal) content from the origin site on the basis that the content was good enough to reach the top spots. With a wealth of proven god content, the scraper site can and has exceeded the ranking of the original site or sites.
Link spamming
Link spamming has the main purpose of manipulating search engine algorythms which provide reputation based on inbound links, primarily this means Google pagerank.
- Link farms
- Spam blogs
- Hidden links
- Expired domain purchases
- Sybil attack (definition from wikipedia)
- Comment spam
Googlebombing
Googlebombs (whilst serious) can be very humerous sometimes. By virtue of the way it works, google will rank a site higher if all of the link text pointing to the page uses the same phrases. Some of the most prolific google bombs include the search phrase “Weapons of mass distruction” which resulted in a fake 404 page stating that “weapons of mass destruction cannot be found” in reference to the Allied search for WMD’s in Iraq. Equally funny was the “More evil than satan himself” which brought back Microsoft homepage as the top result. The serious uses for this kind of “attack” can be easily seen.
Know more? drop me a line and I’ll add other useful descriptions of blackhat SEO techniques.
