Sneaky Redirects
Have you ever clicked on a link in a search-results page only to be redirected to a page that has little or no relevance to the search term you queried? Many black-hat SEO’s use a coding technique that will make your browser redirect to a completely different webpage than what was displayed in the SERP listings.
Such redirects are called ‘302-redirects’ and are discouraged by the major search engines.
Cloaking (or Door-way pages)
Cloaking is defined as “Displaying a page to the search engines that is different to what a human visitor would see”.
SEO’s that promise “1st place rankings guaranteed” will often use cloaking techniques, overloading a webpage with keyphrases that will be ranked highly by the search engines, then redirecting the human user to the real website.
Sites employing cloaking techniques WILL be penalised, as evident by Google’s complete ban of BMW Germany’s corporate website in Feb 2006 for practicing cloaking. Visitors that clicked on the BMW link in the search results received a JavaScript redirect to a glossy brochure-type page.
Automated Page Generation
Some SEO’s will claim to create brand-new copy for new webpages as part of their service. It has been found that many SEO’s ‘steal’ paragraphs from many different related (or even competitors) websites, fitting them together to create a ‘new’ page loaded with keyphrases and links.
Automated software such as ArticleBot extracts snippets from articles on the web, rearranging text to create new webpages. The major search engines have powerful duplicate-content and plagiarism filters that can detect this technique, again imposing penalties or bans on websites that employ this method.
SEO’s will often write or use software that can create thousands of spam webpages that are incorporated into your website. Again, this technique will artificially boost your webpages in the short term, but will result in a penalty as Google is very good at detecting topic relevancy of your site, and detests keyphrase spam.
Hidden Text and Hidden Links
Some black-hat SEO’s will try and fool a search engine into thinking that a website is relevant by adding many keyphrases and links to the page, but display the text as the same colour as the page background.
While browsing some webpages, you may notice that there are large blank areas at the top or bottom of a page. By pressing ‘Control-A’ in Internet Explorer to ‘Select All’, you may notice that in fact these blank areas contain hidden text or links.
There are other ways black-hat SEO’s can hide text from a human visitor; including making the font size extremely small to be invisible to the human reader but not the search engines, or by using Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) tricks to hide text or display the text far off the page.
100% Frame
Sometimes, a search-friendly page will be displayed to the search engines and appear in the search results. The URL of that page will fill the address bar, however this page uses a frame that occupies nearly all of the browser window. A secondary page is displayed in this frame.
This is a form of ‘cloaking’ and websites using this technique may face penalties from the search engines.
Black-hat Link-Building
The major search engines view each inbound link to a website as a ‘vote’ for that page. Generally, it is best practice to have quality inbound links to your website, as the search engines will view the site as having ‘authority’.
The modern Google search algorithm can detect exactly what a ‘quality’ link is, and penalise websites that have many inbound links from ‘bad-neighbourhoods’ or ‘link-farms’.
Many SEO’s will promise “1000 quality inbound links” to your website. However, these links are probably extremely ‘diluted’, non-relevant, or from bad-neighbourhoods.
These links are likely to be generated by the following techniques:
Using purpose-built software to trawl forums and blogs leaving links to the target website. These forums and blogs may be current forums (forum spam) or abandoned forums that are exploited for SEO purposes.
Writing scripts to create ‘fake’ blogs with links pointing back to the target website.
Subscribing to Free For All (FFA) link sites. FFA sites are directories that promote a free link-exchange, even if the links are non-relevant to your website.
Reciprocal links to non-relevant sites. A reciprocal link is a ‘link-exchange’, requiring a link to another website in return for a link back to your site. SEO’s may place links to websites that promote pornography or gambling, resulting in a loss of reputation for your brand, and a penalty from Google.
Please note that Pancentric will only submit your website to directories to your website’s industry, and will NEVER participate in any of the mentioned black-hat link-building techniques.
