Case Black
Black Hat SEO – Howie Schwartz is Back with Version 2
Black Hat Is Back 2 : The Evil and Dark Side of Search Engine Optimization
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to comprehend that the ultimate objective as a webmaster is to appear higher up in the search engine results pages as possible. Google is a dang smart and sophisticated “machine” so what possibility does average joe web enthusiast have to appear in the search engines? What is the secret ingredient that allows you to outsmart your competitors?
The solution to this million dollar question really depends on which niche you are trying to enter – naturally if the niche you are entering is highly competitive, the most common phrases will have been already optimized by your competition and it will be very difficult to appear on the first page.
Despite all of this, the search engines are definitely not 100% accurate. How many times have you looked for a term and discovered the first page of results are totally junk? – and out of these first ten results, perhaps only 1 or 2 are really relevant to what you’re looking for. Dang frustrating to say the least when you’re constantly clicking the back button (by the way, Google actually takes this into consideration now – the bounce rate of a website can actually be calculated based on how quick a visitor hits the back button after landing on your site.)
Obviously, if your web page is focused and the information you display is tightly related to what the visitor entered into the search engine, then the likelihood of them them “bouncing” from your site should obviously decrease – seems blatantly obvious doesn’t it?
Now despite all the above-board or “white hat” methods available, there have been some nasty webmasters who have achieved top rankings in the search engines using sneaky tactics which are known as “spamdexing” – or Black Hat SEO If you are able to artificially raise your positioning in the search engines’ results by using techniques which are not considered “white-hat”, then you are utilizing some sort of Black Hat SEO method – even if it’s as simple as creating an inbound link from another site that you own. Is it sneaky and/or evil to outrank OTHER people’s sites which are actually more related than your own? Absolutely. Are there lots of people doing it? Absolutely!
However, since Google is indeed getting a heck of a lot smarter, some of the typical techniques of taking advantage of the search engines simply won’t work anymore. Some of these methods include, but are not limited to:
Meta-Tag Stuffing:
Using keywords in the Meta tags more than once and/or using phrases that are unrelated to the site’s content.
Keyword Stuffing:
The practice of overusing a particular word to increase how often the word appears within the content of a page. There is a generally accepted ‘normal’ level that most modern search engines have the ability to scan.
Invisible or Hidden Links:
When a webmaster creates a network of links between multiple sites on the same or similar topic that he/she owns and then joins these together with invisible links. The multiple sites may or may not have unique content, in most cases they do not.
Hiding Text:
Hiding text (targeted keywords) on a page in order to increase a keywords frequency but placing the text where a typical visitor will not see it. In most cases, this is simply achieved by making the text the same color as the background color of the page ie. Black words on a black background.
Link Spamming:
Google determines the page rank of a site or page by analyzing the amount of incoming links that site or page has – the more offsite pages that link to your page, the higher your page rank. Some webmasters may create multiple websites at different hosting accounts that all link to one another. This is the most common form of Black Hat SEO techniques.
Cloaking:
This technique involves showing visitors and search engines different versions of a page.
Each of the above methods is a type of Spamdexing or Black Hat SEO, and will usually get sneaky webmasters who utilize them to use banned from the search engine or “sandboxed” – which is a fancy word for being delisted from the main search results. Not the best thing to happen as a webmaster. One of the most aggressive marketers out there is Howie Schwartz and his teachings are documented in a video series called Black Hat Is Back 2.