Part I

Anyone entering the world to search engine optimization certainly will learn pretty quickly about different neat tricks of the trade. Some of these practices are legitimate (…in the eyes of Google) and will not result in a penalty or outright ban from the search engines.

But others – known in the trade as ‘black hat’ – are questionable at best these days. Some of these practices were okay back in the 90’s when search engines were still in their infancy. Today they’re much more advanced though and can easily spot many of the practices I’ll outline below.

One thing you need to remember though – when we say search engines, we primarily mean Google. They capture over 2/3 of the Internet’s searches. When you’re optimizing a website for the search engines, you’re primarily working with Google from an SEO perspective.

Continue reading for 8 SEO tricks you want to avoid altogether. Doing so is your best insurance against being penalized by Google.

Because once you’re in that hole, it’s a real challenge to dig yourself out.

8 ‘Black Hat’ SEO practices you should avoid at all costs (1-4)

The practices described below are generally considered by Google to be ‘black hat.’ If they decide to manually review your site’s code and remove you from their listing, it can take a long time to recover. It’s best to avoid these practices involving keywords, links and other technical elements of your website.

1. Keyword stuffing – a practice that’s been around awhile

Keyword stuffing is perhaps the oldest trick in the book when it comes to SEO. Search engines loathe keyword stuffing and can absolutely detect it. Basically, keyword stuffing consists of repeating keywords over and over again. It usually appears at the bottom of a page in very small text.

If you’re trying to target the phrase ‘mountain vacations’, one common keyword stuffing move would look like this in your site’s code:

<h6>mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations</h6>

As you may or may not know, an <h6> heading makes text very tiny. Including this on the bottom of a webpage isn’t noticeable by people but is noticed by search engines. In the early days of SEO, this is how webmasters got their sites to the top of the search engines.

Keyword stuffing can also be done in meta-description, keyword and image ALT tags.

For ALT tags, say we have an image and include our keyword in the alt and title tags for the image. This is considered keyword stuffing by Google and will land you in trouble.

To see if any webpage has any of these elements, simply use the ‘Source Code’ feature on your browser.

While it’s possible to trick the search engines for awhile if you’re really experienced, they almost always detect keyword stuffing and act accordingly. Also, it’s possible competitors will file spam reports with Google so avoid keyword stuffing.

2. Invisible, barely visible or hidden text

A constant dilemma for search engine marketers is to develop web pages that appeal to both visitors and the search engines. The dilemma is the fact that search engines love simple pages with lots of content.

Real people like pages with animation, graphics and lots of special effects – the very same elements search engines cannot crawl and index.

One of the ways SEOs used to get around this was to create text that’s invisible or hidden. But with today’s more sophisticated search engines, this can be construed as keyword stuffing and get you in trouble.

One way webmasters would do this is to create text as the same, or near identical, color of the page’s background. Doing this in effect means the visitor won’t see any words but the search engines will find all of those keywords.

For example, you can have a white background <bgcolor=”#FFFFFF> with a text font of white <fontcolor=”FFFFFF”>. It’s also possible to use a slightly different text color by offsetting one of the colors a little bit. This will be a little harder for the spiders to detect but if Google manually reviews it, they will definitely catch it.

CSS is another creative way webmasters have adapted the hidden text strategy. They basically would use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to hide text from humans while making it available to search engines.

Below is an example of our keyword using a CSS visibility: hidden font format.

<div style=”visibility:hidden;”>mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations</div>

To see the text, someone will have to look at your page’s source code.

Human reviewers at Google do review sites so once they check yours out, they’ll certainly see you’ve done this if you have. There’s only one instance where it’s okay and that’s if you use CSS sheets that let you tab hidden and unhidden text. These kinds of things are common with product listings on ecommerce sites.

This is generally viewed to be okay we think but in order for that to be the case, the user must have the option to choose whether or not to view the text.

One more way to hide text using CSS sheets is to use layers and place text behind pictures or other objects on the page. Known as the z-index function, the webmaster would simply assign the viewable item a higher z-index number than the hidden text.

Next, they would use another CSS function called absolute positioning to position the text and image in the same exact location.

Again, this tactic is harder for a computer to detect but careful review by someone will certainly reveal it. It’s best to avoid this or any other tactics designed to hide text from visitors but make it viewable by the search engine spiders.

3. Selling links for the purpose of increasing a target URL’s PageRank

Another practice search engines frown profoundly on is selling links on your site. Paid links often look unnatural and if you see them, none of them have anything in common. Take the following example for instance, which you may have seen across the bottom of some web pages:

Mountain vacations – Plastic Surgeons in Florida – Buy Gold – Used Cars for Sale

As you can tell, none of these have anything to do with the other, which is a tell-tale sign of selling links. If the links are all for businesses located in the same town for example, then there’s no problem. But if a page has links going to an offshore gambling site, then there’s more risk of getting into trouble.

Using reciprocal link directories can also result in a penalty in some situations, especially if they have a wide focus of unrelated content.

Somewhat related to selling links is the risk for your site getting infected by Malware or being hacked. If you’ve setup your Google Webmaster’s Toolbox, then you should receive a warning from Google saying your site has been hacked or hosting Malware.

If you end up in Google’s penalty box for selling links, it can take some time and effort to get out. First you should remove the links and promise Google to never do it again. It usually takes 3 months or longer between the time they set your PageRank to zero and you get back in.

Many webmasters though find the profits too good to pass up despite the rigid warnings and penalties for selling links. Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to learn more about their position on this topic.

4. Hidden Links and the Phantom Pixel

Another couple of practices involving links that Google really can’t stand and loves to penalize sites for are hidden links and what’s known as the phantom pixel.

Hidden links are basically links obscured from a visitor’s view that are strategically placed to direct the search engine to an unrelated site. The webmaster likely wants these off-topic sites to be indexed and rank well. Using hidden links boosts link juice (…or PageRank) on favored web pages.

Whether paid for or not, the point is the links are NOT there for the site visitor to find. Since they hold no value for the site visitor, Google and other search engines penalize sites that have them.

Techniques for hiding links are quite similar to invisible/semi-visible strategies for keywords. CSS layering like we discuss above is another strategy. Heck, you can even include links in the period at the end of a sentence. Even though the link is still technically invisible, search engines will still consider it a hidden link and act accordingly.

Phantom pixels are much like the invisible or hidden link in a period at the end of a sentence but instead the link is placed in a 1×1-pixel image. These images can also contain keywords in their alt tag like we talk about above but webmasters also use these super small images for hiding links.

Like other things we’ve talked about today, phantom pixels are another way for your site to be penalized or even banned – assuming Google discovers these ‘black hat’ tricks on your site.

And eventually you can assume you will be caught.

While the search engine spiders may not be able to catch everything, a manual review of your site’s source code certainly will…so take our word for it, be careful by not using any of these or the other 4 ‘black hat’ SEO tricks we’ll get into next time.

Check back with us late Monday to learn about the other 4 ‘black hat’ SEO tricks you should avoid like plague.

And if you’ve used any of these techniques, briefly tell us about your experience and how you dealt with any penalties.