Black Hat SEO is really bad for your website and business, and is the wideley used term for website spam linking and a few other underhand practices that are not just ethically frowned upon, but also  dangerous. The aim of this breed of SEO is to fool the search engines in to thinking your website has a better score than it actually has, a mask of sorts.

We only do real SEO but some companies STILL use these practices..   really!

Spamdexing or search engine spam or search engine poisoning, is the original black-hat SEO technique that 'coined' the phrase BlackHat SEO. The production of spam methods was then, and is now still, not ethical and  a high percentage of spamdexed sites (99.99%) of sites spammed in this way to achieve better search results are one day going to discovered by the search engines and penalised. This can mean thee black death for your website and domain name.

With the likes of the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo constantly aiming to achieve better relevance in their SERPs for websites that meet the users search needs, then more and more website owners and webmasters started to discover new ways to fool the search results.

Managing and improving your website, takes a lot more time than you can imagine as it gets bigger. But as most webmasters are not web developers they soon realised that trying to fool the search engines is not as easy as just adding keywords.

Link spam was born out of the amazing Google pagerank tool bar application, combined with a few eager webmasters, who then jumped on the links and SEO train.

When Webmasters started to see that doing lots of different methods to get higher results SEO became a buzzword. (more visibility).

Cookies are deployed by webmasters to track users on your website and perform forwarding information too, and this is room for manipulation.  Typically they have been found in sites trying to fool the referral site into thinking the traffic has come from there website, earning the webmaster a paid referral fee. But they have not sent real traffic, they have spoofed the referral site.

This technique aims to hide crucial content that is invisible to people, but visible to the search engines, misleading both parties. The hidden content may be stuffed full with 100's or 1,000's of keywords that most of the time are irrelevant to the content on the page and also called 'keyword stuffing'

Page Hijacking is carried out by creating a replica of the original site, commonly banks and eCommerce sites have been targeted like this.  The fake site will look like the original in every little details, and will be hard to spot as fake. It has one aim though and isn't going to end well, it wants to steal you login details. Then the individual can use your accounts. Not good.

This form of black hat SEO will redirect your visiting traffic to another website or even to a hidden page on your own site, which is even harder to find.

Sybil attacks involve a individual setting up many fake accounts with different personas (fake name, fake age etc), with one thing in mind; to post bad comments and create bad feeling about your site via fake reviews.

The creation of mirror websites is a technique where a full copy of a 3rd party website has been reproduced. The Mirror Websites are then used for stealing user information, traffic and visitors of the copied site.

These are websites that have used bots to systematically copy webpages.

Buying Expired Domains can be great and when a domain name looks reputable and has recently expired it can be worthwhile. Have you been offered domain names from companies stating that they are already ranked? Sometimes these rankings are false and have been spammed already to make them look like they are a good buy. Buyer beware.

Doorway aka Gateway Pages aka Link Baiting is a term for pages stuffed with keywords to get a higher search ranking. Websites may direct you to other websites with what looks like a normal 'Click here to enter' button but take you to a site that is unknown, are also classified as link bait.

Article Spinning of content is done with a new kind of software that spins and rewrites article copy. if you do this manually the process would take hours and hours, but Article spinning software is specifically designed to carry out this in seconds and fool the search engines, not so much people.

Splogging is a term used for Spam Blogging and us carried out to generate backlinks to another webpage or site. Also called wheel spam or 'blog satellites' and one of the oldest BlackHat Techniques. 

Buying cheap links is now over 10 years old and is still popular now. It is something to be cautious about though and as cheap SEO links are typically created automatically by software that can leave trails for others to follow, search engines will see through these and de-rank your site. By using MOZ or AHREFS for instance these links can be spotted and analysed and are typically done en mass.

Most of us have used forums of some form and with people of similar interests, be it cars, dogs, cats or sport. But if you notice that some forum members post the same comments and create posts again and again, this is usually to get more backlinks to there website.

A history Of Black Hat SEO Techniques, so far..