The aim of SEO is the coveted 1st rank position in search rankings. Winning the 1st position means all eyes will see your site first, greatly increasing the likelihood that a visitor will stop by your page. To compete for positioning, SEO experts utilize a number of creative strategies to win favor with the search engine. However, no-two strategies are equal, and some are considered harmful or “Blackhat”.
Blackhat SEO strategies utilize tactics that are disapproved by major search engines, but work to increase a page’s ranking in a search listing. If a site is caught implementing Blackhat SEO strategize, then they face the possibility of being penalized and banned from the search listings all together.
When working to improve the search ranking of your site, it’s essentially to be weary of the lasting effects of your strategies and tactics. While some Blackhat SEO strategies may win a slight increase in search ranking, search engines are quick to catch on and penalize a site. Here are some Blackhat tactics to beware of:
- Stuffing Content with Hidden Keywords and Links
Since the early days of the internet, search engines would crawl site pages for keywords to determine its relevancy to search queries. In simplest terms, the page is indexed, weighed, and ranked against other pages for relevancy to earn a certain position in the search listings.
The competitiveness of the internet would inspire some webmasters to find ways of gaming the system. Up until the early 2000’s, one popular tactic was stuffing pages with hidden keywords and links to take advantage of search engine crawls. These methods led to a massive downgrade in content quality as pages became unreadable with unnatural prose and irrelevant link lists.
The most common method of hiding keywords and links on a page is to match the font color to the background. To users, it was obvious when webmasters stuffed their sites with hidden keywords because it would leave empty blocks of space on a page. Other methods of hiding keywords include:
- Setting font sizes to zero.
- Using CSS to position text off screen.
- Abusing Alt Tags.
To combat stuffing keywords and links, search engines tightened their indexes and actively banned entire sites that were caught. Today, keyword stuffing is entirely ineffective and is one of the surest ways to earn a penalty as search engines algorithms rank for semantics, instead of the face value of keywords.
- Meta Tag Stuffing
A site’s Meta Tags were once intended as a proxy for information about its content. The Meta Tag is the first step in the process of a search engine’s crawl for keywords. Depending on the search engine, information pulled from the Meta Tags can include:
- A count of keywords used
- A count of keywords used in subheadings
- A count of keywords used in the title
With Meta Tags being the first step to a crawl, early webmasters saw this as an opportunity to stuff as many keywords as possible. However, the punishment for being caught with Meta Tag stuffing is severe and could get a site blocked from searches.
In 2009, Google released an article claiming that Google Search no longer uses Meta Tags as an SEO ranking factor. Link building – other sites linking to your site – is considered a reward for publishing quality content. When the content of your site is easy to read, full of information, and easily accessible, another site is more likely to link to yours. To search engines, sites with many backlinks are viewed as having a high level of authority – earning them a higher ranking in the search listings. While link building is meant to occur naturally, one shortcut that some webmasters found was to invest in a service that would publish hundreds of backlinks to their site. However, the vast majority of these services are spammy in nature and will publish links to site with questionable reputations. When a site is found with many backlinks to flagged or questionable sites, the site is investigated and potentially penalized for Blackhat practices. This was what happened massive retailer J.C. Penney in mid-September 2011. J.C. Penny was under investigation by Google for suspiciously ranking in the 1st position in nearly every search query, including irrelevant queries. When J.C. Penny was found to contain backlinks from known link buying sites, it resulted in J.C. Penny’s site dropping from the 1st result for queries like “Samsonite carry on luggage” to the 71st position in a matter of hours.[2] It would take J.C. Penny, one of the largest retailers in the world, half a year to earn a position on the 1st page.[3] Since 2012, major search engines like Google have made aggressive changes to their search algorithms to actively crawl and ban sites for poor link building practices. Sites caught with backlinks to spammy sites and other suspicious link building activity are banned from search listings. Earning a high placement in search listings is difficult and requires a lot of patience. Sites who game the system are certainly caught as search engines evolve and prioritize use experience and content quality. In our next blog, we’ll look at the rise and fall of more Blackhat SEO tactics in the history of SEO. [1]Matt C. “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking”. Google. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html [2]David S. “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search”. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all [3]Ibid.
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