Don't allow your site to be used for black hat seo

The function of a good search engine is to provide good appropriate content to a human reader (you). SEO (search engine optimization) tells the search engines what a site and an individual page is about so that you can get targeted visitors to your site and the search engine can do it's job easier.

It should be a win-win-win situation:

1. Search engine wins because it can serve the best pages for a given search term (keyword).
2. The user wins by going to the right page.
3. You win because ten targeted visitors are better than a hundred visitors fooled into coming to your site. The targeted visitors are more likely to stay on your site longer and return to your site.

Doing SEO in order to help the search engines, and the users is white hat SEO....

Black hat SEO is when someone uses deceptive tactics to make the search engine think that the page deserves to be higher on the search list than it ought to be. Obviously I don't study these techniques because I believe they go against Spiritual Internet Marketing and are bad Karma as well as being bad commercial practice and will harm you in the long run.

I do notice them at times and anyway some have been well known for a long time. One of these is known as keyword stuffing. Here you put lots and lots of keywords in a non-readable section of the page. People used to write the keywords in the same color as the background, hide underneath graphics, write in tiny fonts and so on.

The search engines would however read only the text and imagine that the keywords are part of the content and give the page more relevance than it deserved. However, the search engine improve daily and will notice Black Hat techniques sooner or later and penalize the site or totally deindex it (no page from that site will show up at all).

That is another reason beyong the bad Karam and the morality reasons that you should not do any black hat SEO and my own recommendation is against even gray hat SEO (murky areas of SEO). The best thing to do is to write good content and add on page optimization and get real appropriate backlinks.

OK you are a good person. You only do white hat SEO, but you have a site which allows people to register and then post to your site. You can get your site damaged and deindexed if your site is the source of black hat SEO.

This morning I was doing some research with Google Alerts for ideas of what to write and I noticed a page which used keyword stuffing to the max. Out of curiosity I did some research on WHOIS and discovered that the site itself was a perfectly good educational site using moodle (it's an open source couseware program I believe) from Germany.

Someone had obviously had registred and was using the fact they could post things to spam and sell all sorts of pills from an educational site. I registered to get the email of a person associated with the site and sent this (I'm not revealing the person's name for privacy):

Dear First Name Last Name,

I registered with your site to let you know that one of your students appears to be using your site for commercial black hat SEO activities. I discovered this as part of my research for my blogs and I'm always curious about different spam and bad Internet practices.

The link is: xxxxxxxx


Best wishes,

Dr. Javad Hashtroudian from Los Angeles.

Please make sure your site is not used for such practices by monitoring anything anyone else posts on your site (I know it may be difficult if you use moodle or have a bulletin board) and having them as drafts first before they go online.

Also if you do discover any such activities on someone else's site take five minutes of you time, like me, and send the person an email like the one above informing the person of how a spammer is using the site.