Yet Another SEO : Black Hat SEO

Never heard of the term before? Don’t worry you are not alone, most of us don’t. It is simple; following those techniques of SEO that will get you banned by the search engines. Hence, it will be best in your efforts not to do any such thing knowingly or un-knowingly. Once banned by search engine, it will almost be impossible to get your reputation back. Hence, I will discuss about these things here.

Copied content: Content copy is a big no. Always write original article. Good search engines keep a track of all pages all over the Internet and they have a very strong spam control system in place.

Say suppose you write and article and someone just copies it and is earning on your efforts. Would you not complain against search engines too, after-all it is they who help a page get traffic and hence they play a big role in Internet marketing. No big search engine want to earn a bad name, loose credibility and hence loose business. Therefore, they are very strict against copied stuff.
Let me give you a good example. Sometimes back one of hubbers called “Dorsi” had her hub copied by someone on a blog. She complained and the blogger account was banned completely. Read the whole story here at http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/11324

Irrelevant keywords: It is very important to choose correct keywords for your article. If you optimise your site for wrong keywords then your site will be shown in SERPs (seach engine result page) for topics which your site do not deal with. Your visitors will expect something while they will get something else. It will not only irritate your site visitors but it will irritate search engines too, which is a very bad thing to happen.

Sites optimized for wrong keyword are heavily punished as they deceive users and search engines never want to be a part of bad deed. Hence, it won’t take even a day for the site to get banned. That is why you should carry your keyword research very carefully and spend ample time on it.

Keyword stuffing: Make use of your keywords judiciously. Just because the presence of keywords will get you good traffic, do not start stuffing your page with them unnecessarily. Keep a close eye on the keyword density of your page (I have discussed about it here in On Page Optimization). Wherever you use keyword, use it only as per requirement be it page title, meta tag, alt text of images or anywhere else. The logic is very clear, use only proper and required keyword at proper place.

Hidden keywords: When search engine started penalizing site that used irrelevant keywords, many webmasters found out another way to get away with it. They started using irrelevant keywords on the page but in a way such that it used to be hidden i.e. keywords either had colour that of the background of the page or were made invisible by the use of styles. So even though those words were invisible to human eyes but were still visible to search engines. This made search engines display those pages in their result list even for the keywords that were not relevant to the page content.

Now this is not the case anymore. Search engines now read even the styles used on the page and the CSS files that contain the page styles. Any page or site found using this kind of spamming are also punished. Do not even think about it.

Linking to banned site: Just because you have to make your site popular, don’t just start exchanging links with anyone. Before you put a site’s link on your page make sure that search engines have not banned the site. If you link to any banned site it simply means you are voting for him so you too will be banned. It is not only criminals but their supports too are punished. But the story doesn’t end here, not only you should be careful while linking to your partners but you have to keep checking their status every now and then. The moment you find any one of your partners banned, remove their links from your pages immediately.

Now one may ask, what if the banned site starts linking to you (to do you harm)? Nothing will happen to you. You cannot control what others are doing on their site and search engines understand this too. So relax!

Now you will ask how to find if a site had been banned? Go to any online tool that will display the page rank of a page (I have discussed how to find the page rank here at SEO Concepts and Tools). If the page rank is shown as ZERO then most probably the site is banned. Pages that are given page rank zero are very new but if the page is old enough then a zero rank means that Google has banned the site.

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