On-page black hat SEO techniques

Last updated on December 15, 2009. Tags: black hat SEO, cloaking, doorway page, invisible text, keyword, keyword stuffing, on page SEO

On-page blackhat SEO refers to search engine optimization techniques that are forbidden by search engines, considered to be unethical and deceptive and can be implemented by tweaking the content of any pages or the structures of the website.

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

Invisible text

The term invisible text refers to those text that visible to search engine crawlers but not to humans. The main idea for invisible text is that search engines can read the invisible content and rank the webpage for keywords within that content.

There are several ways of creating invisible text to a webpage. Some of these are:

Having text of the same color as the background
Making font size very small to read or to notice
Placing texts inside a block element that is set to be invisible, have zero width and zero height, or placed
at the far side of the page way beyond the sides of the browser window, all can be done using CSS.

Fortunately, search engines now have the means to determine if a text or a block of text was set to be invisible and penalize the erring sites appropriately. Invisible text frequently works together with keyword stuffing or doorway page (or both of them).

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing refers to the insertion of irrelevant keywords or inserting relevant keywords much more than what is needed. These keywords may be visible or invisible (hence combining with invisible text). Keywords can be stuffed in image alt and title text, in iframe/noframe tags of pages that are using iframes/frames, or in one section of the page that while visible is not much noticed.

Keyword stuffing is basically the answer of blackhat practioners to Google, which ignores the meta keywords in determining the relevance of a page. The stuffing of keywords then moves to the actual content. However, search engines are now smarter than what keyword stuffers think. An entire paragraph within the image alt tag can easily alarm search engines that something is wrong with the site.

The title tag and the post tags (for blogs) are now the parts of a website wherein keyword stuffing happens frequently. So far, I never heard of anyone getting banned for stuffing the title tag and the post tags. In case of title tag, however, I noticed that Google gives more importance to the keywords that comes first and less to the keywords that comes later.

Doorway page

The doorway page is an isolated webpage that has no other purpose but to get a high rank in search engine results page. It is filled with either stuffed keywords or a content that makes sense but usually taken from another website that ranks very high for the targetted keywords. While it is also possible for the content of the doorway page to be an original creation, there's one thing that makes a doorway page a doorway page: it's content is not the one the webmaster intended for human visitor, it is purely for search engine ranking.

The webmaster can then redirect the visitor to another site either by making all text invisible and the only visible thing is a hyperlink text or image that says "click here" or something to that effect. S/he can also set the meta refresh so that upon entering the doorway page, the visitor will be automatically redirected to the wesite or webpage s/he would like to present.

There are several ways of implementing doorway page. In some websites, the index page itself is the doorway page. Other webmasters would purchase several keyword-containing domains with no other purpose but to get indexed separately by search engines. Some will do the same thing to subdomains instead of availing a separate domain.

Aside from the fact that search engines can now see through invisible text, the meta refresh is actually much easier to penalize. Moreover, search engine can simply skip the doorway page and index only the pages that contains real content.

Cloaking

The SEO technique called cloaking refers to the presentation of two different content to search engine crawlers and to human visitors. This technique relies on detecting the IP address (or in some User-Agent HTTP).

Basically, there are two (or possibly more) versions of the page. The server then use the IP address to determine who (or what) is trying to access the website. If the one accessing is a search engine crawler, one version of the site rich in targetted keywords will be presented. If it's a human person, then the other version, the one really intended by the webmaster to be seen by people, will be presented.

The version presented to search engines are usually stuffed with keywords, which may or may not be related to the content presented to human visitors.

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

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