In the world of magic, there are two main streams of Magic : White Magic and Black Magic. (*Ahem this week I am still suffering from my Harry Potter withdrawal syndrome). Black Magic or dark magic is the direct opposite of white magic. It is used for malevolent acts or to deliberately cause harm in some way. In modern times, people who believe in or claim to practice black magic is described as harmful magic practitioner and they considered as taboo, as opposed to the good white magic that they do profess to practice. The theory can be applied to Black Hat Search Engine Optimization, SEO. They are considered to be illegal practices to gain high ranking in search engine result page (SERP). In order to avoid penalization by search engines, it is good to know what is Black Hat SEO.
Here are some of the example of Black Hat SEO that you should avoid:
1. Keyword Stuffing
“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking.
You should always try to focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
Solution
To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated. Check carefully, because keywords can often be in the form of hidden text, or they can be hidden in title tags or alt attributes.
2. Hidden Texts and Hidden Links
Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:
- Setting the font size to 0
- Using white text on a white background
- Including text behind an image
- Using CSS to hide text
Hidden links are links that are intended to be crawled by crawlers e.g., Googlebot, but are unreadable to humans because:
- The link consists of hidden text (for example, the text color and background color are identical).
- CSS has been used to make tiny hyperlinks, as little as one pixel high.
- The link is hidden in a small character - for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph.
Solution
If you do find hidden text or links on your site, either remove them or, if they are relevant for your site’s visitors, make them easily viewable.
3. Cloaking and sneaky Javascript redirects
If you are a Harry Potter fan then you would probably know that one of the three deathly hallows is the Invisible Cloak. In the world of Black Hat SEO, cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. While Javacsript direct is where a javascript is placed on a page that has been indexed by search engines and redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees.
Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and will be removed from the Google index.
Solution
Do not practice any methods that can be perceived as deceiving users.
4. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Even though, most of such duplicate content are not deceptive in origin, however such practices should be avoided if possible. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:
- Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
- Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
- Printer-only versions of web pages
However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic.
Solution
Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If you think that there are duplicate contents across different domains, you should try to request for those contents to be removed from search engine index e.g., by using the Google Webmaster Tools.
5. Create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
If you have a site that try to exploit user system’s vulnerability by installing install software (such as malware, spyware, viruses, adware, and trojan horses), it is considered to be a violation of the Google quality guidelines, and may be removed from Google’s index.
Solution
Always try to make sure what programs you installed in your web server and on your webpage.
So let me quote something from Professor Albus Dumbledore :
“And now Harry, let us step out into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure”.
So let’s be a good Harry Potter webmaster and practice white magic, white hat SEO, and be loved by all search engines.
To learn more about proper SEO techniques, you can refer to these posts :
