Inside A Black Hat's Toolbox (First Half)

We've been hearing around the world the dangers of using black hat tactics in in SEO's. However, not many of the articles available in mainstream internet fully list what those tactics are.

Perhaps one of the reasons why this occurs is the natural evolution of the internet itself. For example, if someone told you five years ago that SEO would be the most in-demand professionals in the internet today, you would have probably laughed. But as things would play out, SEO's are pretty much the mainstay in the internet industry. This is the very reason why it is difficult to fully categorize the number of tactics used that are in clear violation of the Google Webmaster policies. Even so, there are tactics that can be easily identified that can be listed down to serve as a guide. These tactics can be categorized based on how they unethically manipulate search engine rankings. This article will be discussing the first class: content spamming.

According to Wikipedia, content spamming involve altering the logical view that a search engine has over the page's contents. They all aim at variants of the vector space model for information retrieval on text collections.

Keyword stuffing – involves the calculated placement of keywords within a page to raise the keyword count, variety, and density of the page. This is useful to make a page appear to be relevant for a web crawler in a way that makes it more likely to be found.

Hidden or invisible unrelated text – Disguising keywords and phrases by making them the same color as the background, using a tiny font size, or hiding them within HTML code such as "no frame" sections, ALT attributes, zero-width/height DIVs, and "no script" sections. However, hidden text is not always spamdexing: it can also be used to enhance accessibility. People screening websites for a search-engine company might temporarily or permanently block an entire website for having invisible text on some webpages.

Meta tag stuffing – Repeating keywords in the Meta tags, and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site's content. This tactic has been ineffective since 2005.

"Gateway" or doorway pages – Creating low-quality web pages that contain very little content but are instead stuffed with very similar keywords and phrases. They are designed to rank highly within the search results, but serve no purpose to visitors looking for information. A doorway page will generally have "click here to enter" on the page.

Scraper sites – Scraper sites, also known as Made for AdSense sites, are created using various programs designed to "scrape" search-engine results pages or other sources of content and create "content" for a website. The specific presentation of content on these sites is unique, but is merely an amalgamation of content taken from other sources, often without permission.

The use of these methods have been reduced over the years, but the effects they left behind are still a testament to the negative impact they have caused to the SEO community.