Spams and Scams
White-Hat SEO and Black-Hat SEO
 Ethical SEO techniques will adhere to the recommendations
of the Search Engines as part of their design (White-Hat SEO). Those techniques that the Search
Engines do not approve of are called Black-Hat SEO.
The following hyperlinks provide Webmaster guidelines that help the Search Engines find, index,
and rank a Website. They also list bad practices that may lead to a Website being removed
from their index.
An SEO technique is considered acceptable if it conforms to the above Search Engine guidelines
and involves no deception. The content that a Search Engine indexes and subsequently ranks
must be the same content that the Website visitor sees. Acceptable SEO does not attempt to
trick the Search Engines algorithms.
Black-Hat SEO attempts to improve Rankings in ways that are disapproved of or involve deception.
This could be text that is hidden, or having different pages for the visitor and Search Engine,
or using link farms or keyword stuffing.
The Search Engines look for SEO companies and their clients that artificially inflate a site's
Ranking, and will remove them from their indices. Or if a competitor works out what is being
done to gain a top Ranking, the Website will be reported and banned.
The Black-Hat SEO Tactics are:
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword Stuffing is also known as Spamdexing or Search Engine Spam. It involves repeating
unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevancy of a Keyword Phrase. In order to offset the
fact that this text generally reads horribly it will often be placed at the bottom of a page,
in a small font size. This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of Search Engine
spam.
Hidden Text
Hidden text is text that is set to the same colour as the background or close to it. This
is easily detected, so some Webmasters set the background from an image file. This is obvious
spam, and the offenders are quickly blacklisted.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a method of presenting different information to the Search Engines than that which
the visitor sees. There are many methods of cloaking, and some of them are undetectable by
the Search Engines. It is up to the competition to monitor and report such abuses.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages added to a website solely to target a specific keyword phrase or phrases
and provide little in the way of value to a visitor. Often these pages are generated by software
and added to a site automatically. Many of the methods of injecting doorway pages are banned
by the Search Engines.
Redirects
Redirecting, when used as a Black-Hat tactic, is most commonly brought in as a complement
to Doorway Pages. Because doorway pages have no substantial content, redirects are applied
to automatically move a visitor to a page with actual content.
Duplicate Sites
Many webmasters create a copy of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it
online in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture their sales. This
tactic is banned and the Search Engines have methods for detecting and removing duplicate
sites from their index.
Interlinking
Incoming links have become important for Search Engine positioning. The practice of building
multiple websites and linking them together to build overall link popularity has become common
practice. This tactic is difficult to detect, but with multiple sites in the top positions
of the Search Engines, it is likely that such Websites are soon reported by competitors.
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