Off-page black hat SEO techniques

Last updated on December 15, 2009. Tags: black hat SEO, blog comment spam, forum spam, link farms, off-page SEO

Off-page blackhat SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are forbidden by search engines, considered to be unethical and deceptive and requires the building of inbound links towards the site.

Some of the known off-page blackhat SEO techniques are as follows:

Link farms

The term linkfarm refers to a group of websites that are linking to one another in an attempt to increase the link popularity of each one of them. Link farms are usually aided by automated programs so that each website automatically add links to all other members of the link farm. Members link to other members regardless of whether these other members are relevant to the topic of the site or not. Link farms are also known as mutual admiration societies.

Link farms are usually differentiated from web directories in that directories are arranged in categories wherein similar sites are grouped together. Moreover, web directories undergo human reviewers while link farms simply add just anyone who joins them and willing to provide reciprocal links. The best web directories are those that caters only certain niches like blog directories, school website directories, sports website directories, etc.

Nowadays, link farms are no longer useful. Google, the most widely used search engine, no longer based the link popularity on just the number of incoming links, but also on the so called Google PR, a number 1 to 10 assigned to a website, wherein the links coming from sites with higher PR are regarded as more powerful "vote". Government websites ending with .gov, school websites ending with .edu as well as news outlets usually have high PR.

Hidden links

May work in conjunction to link farms or just an agreement among several parties to link to each other. This is somehow a combination of link farm and invisible text. A webmaster realizes that a number of links in his/her webpage are in fact irrelevant to the topic of his/her website but would still like to retain the incoming link vote and thus he must maintain the outgoing link vote.

His "link mates" may know that he turned his links invisible, and they may all even agree to make their links to each other invisible. After all, these links are not meant to be clicked by human users. They are meant only to be interpreted by search engines as link votes.

Search engines can detect hidden links just as much as they can detect hidden text, and penalize or ban a website for it, although I am not certain if they distinguish hidden link as a separate violation or just the same case as hidden text (since hidden links usually use anchor text).

Forum and blog spams

A webmaster create so many posts in forums and blogs (as comments) that contain links towards their website. Typically, the objective of the spammer is to post as many possible links as possible. To do this, they will often post really short posts, usually smileys or "hello" or "nice post.

Other spammers will go as far as to create programs to automate the process. This is very easy for WordPress because all WordPress comment form contains four fields arranged in the same order; name, email, website URL and comment. The comment even accepts HTML codes including links.

Fortunately, forums and blog owners are now becoming more vigilant in dealing with spammers. Some forums have policy against posts containing only one liners and smileys. There are forums that require members to have certain number of posts before they can post links.

In WordPress, you can choose to regulate the blog comments before they show up. You can also have a list of words frequently used by spammers, in which WordPress will automatically send comments containing those words in the spam box. I recently found this feature to be more useful than IP banning because while spammers can use dynamic IP address or hack other people's computers and use them for spamming, marketing through spamming tends to be limited to certain industries.

Moreover, as I mentioned in the white hat side of this discussion, it would be better if you interact and have proper discussion with other bloggers and forum members, and provide exposure for your site directly through those channels instead of hoping only for some PR link juice. That way, people can see you as an expert, not as spammer.

Moreover, if you spam, you might be able produce lots of backlinks, and your out-of-ordinary number of backlinks over a short period of time in turn will alarm Google and other search engines of what you're doing and might penalize or ban your site as a result.

Posted by Greten on May 21, 2009 under Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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Read Comments

Posted by MicroMixx on 06.25.09 1:47 am

I am receiving tons of blog comment spams everyday. Most of the comments are just telling how good you write on your blog and so on.
Black Hat techniques for SEO are really unethical but those techniques are really helpful in ranking well.

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