Avoiding Black Hat SEO

Black hat optimization is essentially cheating the SEO ranking system by using various techniques developers and search engines deem unethical. Such techniques may initially boost a Web site's ranking, but abiding by admissible SEO practices will prevent potential site bans and generate more relevant, and therefore valuable, results.

There are plenty of methods Web developers utilize to make their Web pages searchable, but I will briefly discuss 2 of the most commonly used black hat techniques: doorway pages, keyword stuffing and hidden text.

Keyword stuffing is the practice of "stuffing" keywords (often keywords that are completely irrelevant to the site's main content) anywhere and everywhere on a Web page. Used correctly, keywords play an important part in SEO, but the blatant overuse of keywords can get a Web site penalized by or even banned from search engines. A very good example of contrived keyword stuff can be found the article "SEO tip: Avoid keyword stuffing" at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/avoid-keyword-stuffing/

Hidden text is usually a method of keyword stuffing. Text (often a list of keywords) becomes hidden when a developer changes the text color to match the background color of its container. This renders the text unreadable by viewers (unless highlighted), which often triggers a red flag from search engines. An example of hidden text can be seen on this feedthebot.com article: http://www.feedthebot.com/hiddentext.html.

Obviously, getting penalized or banned from a large search engine like Google can be detrimental to a Web site's success. Avoiding the aforementioned techniques is easy and only requires the careful and appropriate use of keywords. And remember that honest techniques prove to be far more rewarding than trying to cheat the rankings. For more information about what to avoid when optimizing a Web site for search, read the Google Webmaster Help article on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/.