Top 3 Blackhat techniques – Learn more about them

This is going to be an interesting discussion for sure – Anything concerned with Black Hat techniques often gives rise to a lot of curiosity in people. How ‘Black’ are they? Are they really illegal? Do you really get penalized for Black Hat techniques? These are popular questions raging in the minds of people when they hear first about Black Hat techniques.

Webmasters and marketers on their part have lived up to the popularity of this subject and have posted a lot of content for this topic. Surprise of all surprises – There could be many times when you can get away with Black Hat techniques.

We spoke to about 100 Internet Marketers. 60 of them told us that they employ one or the other Black Hat technique. Surprisingly, only 5 of them told us that they got their site banned by search engines.

Curious enough! Let’s start learning some Black Hat Techniques

• Hidden Content – This indeed has to be the king of Black Hat techniques, and no surprises, a lot of webmasters use this method to spike up the traffic to their pages and of course, the search engine visibility too.

Normally, the purpose with which webmasters insert content in their code is to ensure they are visible to end-users or visitors. Now, this is in normal run, but in Black Hat techniques, the content is placed in the code in such a manner that it doesn’t appear to the users.

But, as the content is placed in the code, it does get indexed by the spiders of the search engines. This happens because the Comment tag has a syntax, which supports useful content to be inserted.

A comment tag will look somewhat like this - <! – Comment Tag ->

If you wish to use this correctly, the syntax would be <!- Main Content->

And here is how you would use it as a Black Hat technique

<!- Keyword 1, Keyword 2, Keyword 3 and so on ->

In doing so, what you do is you stuff your comment tag with keywords and not content. These keywords are crawled on by the spiders of search engines and provide traffic to your websites.

This is just one way of including hidden content in your website code. Some other methods include writing of scripts, or using CSS comments to hide the main content or useful content.

Bottom-line – Keyword stuffing is the basic principle on the minds of people when they end up writing hidden content.

• Stuffing of Meta Keywords – Ask any Internet Marketer and he will tell you that meta keywords are important ingredients of their website code. But, do you know that a lot of Internet marketers actually play around with the syntax of these keywords? And, often to a point when they get called, Black Hat.

The basic idea of writing meta tags is to allow search engines to crawl a useful piece of content written for your website.

A properly written meta tag will look like this

<meta name = “description” content = “Company ABC is a premier service providing company specializing in IT Consulting, Business Consulting and Business Outsourcing. If you need IT Consulting Services, please contact us now.”/>

Here is a Black Hat meta tag for you

<meta name = “description” content = “Company ABC is a premier IT Consulting company specializing in IT Consulting, Business Consulting and Business Outsourcing. IT Consulting, Consulting, IT Services are provided by our IT Consulting company. Choose our IT Consulting company for best services. Contact this IT Consulting company now.”/>

The length of the meta tag is rather conspicuous, but noteworthy is the stuffing of the keyword IT Consulting in the example above. Needless to say, the meta tag written correctly probably would make more sense to people and search engines alike.

Nevertheless, this is a Black Hat technique!!

• Link Farming – Back-linking is considered to be a highly effective strategy to increase the quality scores of your web-pages. Building back-links from reputed websites to your website not only increases the traffic, but in essence, the conversion rates and sales jump northwards in a big way too.

Anything good on the Internet, will have a dubious deviation too and link farming is something associated with the linking strategy.

First things, participating in link farming is not desirable for your website at all. Basically, it results in your website being pointed to by a slew of links that can be considered practically useless. Think about it this way – When search engine spiders crawl your web-pages and find that there are some non-sense links to your website, your page’s Q-Score could take a big hit.

And to encourage web-masters to participate in Link Farming, there are a lot of Free for All Links pages on the Internet. Do this – Get onto one of these link farms and try procuring some links to your website. Within no time, you will get hundred links to your site.

But, how many of them are actually worthwhile? Practically none, right!

These are just the top 3 Blackhat techniques that are used by webmasters with a lot of fervor. The objective – To find of a smart and a mean way of pulling traffic to their website and to beat competition, by hook or by crook!

And to their credit, in most occasions, if these techniques are done properly, they do deliver traffic.

But remember, if you think you are smart, search engines are probably smarter. They keep revisiting their algorithms to detect such malicious practices. And, if they get a whiff of something illegal with your website, they could probably penalize you. Worse still – Your site could go up on their SPAM List too.

Though this article talks about Black Hat techniques, we would still recommend you to go for their counterparts – White Hat Techniques. They are legal, they are credible and most importantly, using them wouldn’t get your site penalized or banned.