Black Hat Is Back 2 – SEO Insanity Revisited
Black Hat Is Back 2 : The Evil and Dark Side of Search Engine Optimization
It’s pretty obvious that all webmasters wants to rank higher in the SERPS for whatever term they are pursuing. Knowing Google is so intelligent, what are the chances that an average web marketer can appear at the top in the SERPS? Is there a process to allow yourself an advantage over others that aren’t as knowledgeable
The solution to this million dollar question ultimately depends on which niche you are trying to target – obviously if the niche you are entering is highly competitive, the most common phrases will have been already optimized by your competitors and it will be very difficult to appear on the first page.
Having said that, the search engines are definitely not 100% accurate. I’m sure you’ve experienced numerous times where you’ll type in a keyword to search for and the results are completely a mess – and out of these first ten results, typically 1 or 2 are really relevant to what you’re looking for. It’s obviously pretty frustrating if you’re always clicking the back button to re-enter your search (Which Google now takes into consideration by the way – the bounce rate of a website can actually be determined based on how fast someone clicks the back button after landing on your page.)
Logic would then dictate, if you are serving up relevant information that is highly related to the search term your visitor is looking for, then your “bounce rate” should obviously be less
So unfortunately, over the years in order for various mischievous webmasters to achieve a good ranking in the search engine results pages (or SERPS), these naughty folks use tactics which are called “spamdexing” or as we like to call it Black Hat SEO. Spamdexing or black hat seo techniques include using various methods to systematically manipulate web content pages to artificially raise their position within the SERPS Is it sneaky and/or evil to outrank OTHER people’s sites which are actually more relevant than yours? You Bet. Is this a common practice amongst webmasters? Absolutely!
However, since Google is indeed getting a heck of a lot smarter, some of the typical ways of manipulating the search engines simply will not work any longer. Some of these techniques include, but are not limited to:
MetaTag Stuffing:
Using keyphrases within the Meta tags more than once and/or using keywords that are unrelated to the site’s content.
Stuffing Keywords:
This involves the practice of overusing a word to increase the keyword frequency on a page. Most modern search engines now have the ability to analyze whether the frequency is above normal level.
Invisible or Hidden Links:
When a webmaster creates multiple sites on the same or similar topic and links them all together through invisible links. In most cases, these sites do not have unique content.
Hidden Text:
Putting text (usually keywords) where visitors will not see them to increase a page’s keyword frequency. 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.
Spamming Links:
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 various domain names 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 techniques is a type of Black Hat SEO or Spamdexing , and will usually get sneaky webmasters who put them to use kicked out from the search engine or “sandboxed” – which is a fancy word for being delisted from the main search results. Not a good place to be. 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.