Are You A Black Hatter?

Are You A Black Hatter? If you are using these techniques, you are a Black Hatter (arranged alphabetically).

- Buying Expired Domains: Basically checking on expiring domain's DNS record and PageRank and later buy them when they expire and replace the pages with links to their pages.

- Cloaking: Presenting a different content to search engine spiders than you display to user's browser. This can also be used in ethical SEO

- Doorway Pages: Nonsense pages full of keywords for the purpose of sending a visitor to a page. Also known as landing pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages, bridge pages, portal pages and many more.

- Duplicate Content: Copying other site's written work with little or no changes. This usually depends on the content used, if it's freely redistributable or copyrighted.

- Hidden Text and Links: Text that is the same color as the background or the font is too small to read.

- Keywords that are unrelevant to the site: Optimizing keywords which are not related to your site

- Keywords Stuffing: Excessive and repeatitive keywords in alt tags, meta tags, content, etc. (isulong seoph, isulong seoph, isulong seoph, isulong seoph, isulong seoph, isulong seoph, all for the sake of 3-7% keyword density)

- Link Farms: A network of pages on one or more Web sites, with the sole intention of improving the search engine ranking of those sites.

- Multiple Domains without Redirecting: Using multiple domains and not redirecting to a single domain will cause duplicate content penalty. (Buying multiple domains for isulong seoph entries, for example isulongnaseoph.com,isulongnaseoph.net and isulongnaseoph.org all having the same content, instead of redirecting the other two domains to one site)

- Pages that contant spyware and viruses (Providing spyware, porn, and viruses. Who would do something like that?)

- Google Bomb - It's targeting a specific site by creating links to it using a specific keyword. (For example, promoting an isulong seoph site by creating links everywhere, adding keyword rich text link isulong seoph, no wonder there are over 500,000 results when searching "isulong seoph")

- Google Bowling: Also known as Google Sabotage, Submitting competitors sites to link farms to get them penalized

- Scraping: Pulling information from other websites voilating copyright law and uses them mainly for monetizing the site using advertising. (This is when a site has no real content and uses a scraper tool to get content from other sites)

- Selling PageRank: Providing links to other sites is good, but selling for the sake of PageRank is not.

- Using small images: Using blank images and stuff it with alt keywords or hidden links.

- Spam Comments: Posting fake and random comments on blogs and guestbooks with link to your site

- Spam Emails: Telling everyone about your site knowing they are not interested.

- Spam Referer: Commonly known as Referer Spam, this involves involves making repeated web site requests using a fake referer url. Search engines base the importance of sites by the number of different sites linking to them. With this, a referer-log spam can be used to increase their rankings of the spammer's sites, by getting the referer logs of many sites to link to them.

- Spam Ping: Commonly known as Sping, this involves sending pings from blogs to a ping server excessively in a short span of time.

- Sybil attack: A spammer may create multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other, such as fake blogs.

- Too Many Links: A page with more 100 urls will drain your PageRank (It is recommended to have less than 100 links since more than that can drain one's PageRank in the long run, unless all the links are good high PR and relevant reciprocal sites)

- Using unauthorized software to submit pages, check rankings and other automatic queries. (Lazy people use easy to use tools to do their job, unlike ethical SEOs who are working for days and nights promoting the site)

- URL Redirection: Redirecting to another site without a user's intervention. This is acceptable by using 301 redirect, but using Meta Tag redirect, CGI and Javascripts will be a SEO problem.

If you are guilty with any of these, you're in BIG Trouble dude. Black Hat SEO is very common to SEO newbies who have no idea what are the right methods to optimize their sites. They want everything done as fast and easy as possible. This is very understandable, but they should stop doing these illegal methods immediately.

REPORT A BLACK HATTER:

Reporting a search engine spam is a legitimate means of eliminating unfair competition and making the search engines a more effective resource.
Google: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Yahoo: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam
MSN: http://feedback.search.msn.com/default.aspx

RECOMMENDED LINKS TO MAKE YOUR SITE SEO FRIENDLY:

By simply following these guidelines, you will have no problem getting properly indexed. The right way is usually the hard way.
Google Webmaster Guidelines: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Yahoo Content Quality Guidelines: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html
MSN Guidelines for Successful Indexing: http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

BANNED IN SEARCH ENGINES? VISIT THESE SITES TO BE REINDEXED:

Don't lose hope if your site is banned in search engines, visit these sites to learn more.
Google Request Reinclusion: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35843
Yahoo Review Request: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_urlstatus
MSN Request Reinclude: http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_PROC_ReincludeYourSite.htm

So, will you still use Black Hat Methods? Don't tell me I didn't warn you. Good luck!

Alfredo Palconit is a Web designer from the Philippines. You can visit his portfolio site at Web Design Philippines and seo site at Isulong SEOPH