BlackHat SEO News & Reviews

UnixCommerce Says Blogging Rules the Google SERPS:

I actually agree with this presentation. Why do you think I chose to make this site a blog?

UnixCommerce Blog

As I constantly read what people have to say about black hat SEO, I came across this definition in Wikipedia:

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual site review.

One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list.

What I found interesting is that this definition gives two examples of black hat SEO that are really really outdated. Cloaking by user-agent and keyword masking are a couple of the “oldest tricks in the book” so to speak, and are a couple of tactics that the search engines are now equipped to spot easily and penalize quickly.

If we want a more up-to-date explanation of Black Hat SEO from wikipedia, we have to look up what is being labeled “spamdexing”. This includes much better information such as doorway pages, hidden links, link farms, etc. I recommend the spamdexing page of Wikipedia as a reference to get a base for more Black Hat SEO techniques, since many of those STILL WORK!!!

I saw these vids that were just added to YouTube. This dude talks about black hat SEO strategies. It’s basically a lot of bitching, throwing in stuff like “it’s not fair” and “it hurts people” which isn’t true. Black Hat SEO is abosultely fair, anybody can do it. Black Hat SEO doesn’t hurt anybody, I’ve never seen a black hat website that reaches through your computer screen and stabs you. This isn’t “great content” like they’ve called it.

I don’t think this presenter has actually DONE any of these tactics and has never EXPERIENCED any of the penalties he claims you’ll get. This is just propogating more myths, fears, and unbased claims about black hat SEO strategies. This is a way to try to pitch their site I guess, but it’s just another example of preying on newbies, at least in my opinion.

Even if these claims were legitimate, they just say what they are. They don’t show exactly what people can do that can supposedly get them penalized. Why is that? Probably because they don’t even know how to do what they’re saying NOT to do.