What is "Black Hat" SEO?
FAQ - Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
"Black Hat" Search Engine Optimization uses an old term used to refer to hackers. Basically, a "black hat," the opposite of "white hat" was considered to be someone who possessed adept skills at manipulating computers and code and used this skill for dishonest gains or in a malicious or criminal manner. This term came to be used regarding Search Engine Optimization for the obvious reason - people possessing an adept skill with computers and code turned their powers to manipulating internet search results.
Black Hat SEO practices are numerous and constantly evolving. They include spamming, keyword-stuffing, redirects, crawler pages, doorway pages, hidden text and many more techniques. While these underhanded and dishonest means of getting high search engine rankings were widely used in the past they are becoming more well guarded against today.
Google, with a commanding authority in internet search (getting more than one half of all search traffic on a daily basis) has, from its very beginning, sought to block Black Hat optimizers from getting the results they covet. The Google search algorithms are constantly being updated to combat unethical or dishonest search optimization.
A means Google uses to punish those sites that are thought to be using black hat techniques is banning them from the index. Sites that are banned from the Google index stay that way for at least six months, and can stay banned for even longer. Google does offer options for those webmasters who believe their sites have been mistakenly banned, but this process is far from instantaneous.
The result: Google leads the way in a kind of policing force on the internet geared towards stopping Black Hat optimizers in their tracks. The response to this is that black hat is truly becoming a thing of the past - at least for those sites that hope to be ranked highly, or even at all, in the Google index.
