Search engines are not infallible. We have all, at some point in our searching lives, found a link on the web that seemed interesting or helpful but when clicked were disappointed to find that the destination page was rubbish. Not only is it frustrating but a complete waste of time.
To receive a good ranking, some web page designers
use spamdexing or as we like to call it black hat SEO. Spamdexing or black hat
SEO techniques are the use of various methods to deliberately manipulate HTML
pages to artificially increase their positioning on the search engines results
page.
Everyone has been a victim of spamdexing or black
hat SEO. From the student who is doing research for their Shakespearean essay to the small business owner trying to produce content for their niche-related site, even the minds behind the search engines are annoyed, to say the least.
Spamdexing takes advantage of search engines by
completely ignoring respectable forms of search engine optimization. Spamdexers
use a variety of techniques to make sure their websites are displayed in the
fertile first two pages of search results; in many cases, the pages are
irrelevant and even incomprehensible. Spamdexing includes the following
techniques.
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.
Hidden or Invisible Links:
When a webmaster creates multiple sites on the same or
similar topic and links them altogether through invisible links. The multiple
sites may or may not have unique content, in most cases they do not.
Hidden Text:
Putting text (usually keywords) where visitors
will not see them to increase a page's keyword relevancy. This is commonly done
by making some text the same as the background color of the page ie. White
words on a white background.
Meta tag Stuffing:
Repeating keywords in the Meta tags more than once
and/or using keywords that are unrelated to the content of the site.
Link Spamming:
Google considers page rank through link analysis,
the more web pages that link to your website the higher the ranking. Some
webmasters may create multiple websites at different domain names that all link
to one another. This is the worst form of back hat SEO techniques.
Cloaking:
This technique involves showing visitors and
search engines different versions of a page.
Each of the above methods is a form of spamdexing
or black hat SEO, and will get webmasters who put them to use banned from the
search engine.
