Black Hat SEO Demystified Part II: The Skill Of The Dark Side

Source: Excellent Darth Maul Portrait by dhabih

Welcome to the part II of this series. In this post, we will go through each of the skill and techniques that makes a black hat seo.

Disclaimer: Most of the techniques in this page will most probably get your site ban/penalize/drop. This site and the author of this site will not bear any responsibility if this happen. Please use them solely for experimental/educational purpose.

Spamindexing

Spamindexing is creating hundreds and thousands of pages ( by using script, scraping from SERPS or free keyword articles), with the purpose of being index by search engine to increate its chance to been searched under ‘extremely niche keywords’ (because it is hard to have good rank on major keywords) . And, using ‘Blog and Ping’ method to get all of the scrape pages indexed by search engine. This is the most popular method of black hat SEO to earn substantial amount of money in short time with CPC ads ( e.g, Adsense).

Currently, major search engines are facing problem filtering these kind of site that provide little or no value to users.

Cloaking

Cloaking is basically show one page to the search engine, and show another different page to the visitors.
This is done by filtering search engine bot ( by IP or User-Agent HTTP Header) and redirect them to a different page, using a cloaking script. The main purpose is to ‘fool’ search engine, to have better ranking/indexed by having different content, or to cover up search engine ‘unfriendly’ content.

BMW site got banned from doing that, so is NYTimes.

Link Farm

Link farm is a page (or a group of webpages, mostly) containing a lot of links to other site, mostly reciprocal links. This is done automatically (using link exchange script), to gain a huge number of incoming links. According to SEOs, those links will never be weighted, but some argue that it still works for other search engine such as Yahoo and MSN. Google said: “Linking schemes will often do a site more harm than good.”

Link Dumping

Link dumping is a way to get a lot of easy, free inbound links from comments, free directories, and even the old generation guestbook. Quadszilla gives the following tips on finding site to freely dump the link by querying the below:

“sign my guestbook” + keyword
“Page 1 of 1″ + “Powered by phpBB” + memberlist
“powered by php guestbook” + Keyword
“Add your Website”

*Source

XSS

Acronym for Cross Site Scripting (called XSS to avoid confusion with Cascading Style Sheet, CSS), occurs when a web application gathers malicious data from a user. The data is usually gathered in the form of a hyperlink which contains malicious content within it. The user will most likely click on this link from another website, instant message, or simply just reading a web board or email message.

Source, and more information about XSS.

Google Bombing

Or known as Google Wash, is a certain attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner, using anchor text. The most successful example of Google bombing is the ‘Miserable Failure’ scenario.

A very detailed page about Google bombing, and its accomplished scenario can be found under Wikipedia.

Google Bowling

The deadliest skill of black hat. A method to ‘knock off’ the competitor (which rank higher above) by doing things that violate the guidelines (such as linking to a ‘bad neighbourhood’, comment spam, duplicate content) under the competitor site’s URL. A major headache to the google engineers as there is nothing they can do to differentiate whether those ‘harmful’ activities are been done by the site owner or somebody else.

So there you go, several methods ( or ’skill’) that I knew about black hat SEO. In the next part, I will share my thought about the existence of Black Hat SEO, its impact to the industry (and the rest of the web), and would like you to share your thoughts. I hope you enjoy this series so far ;)

Next and final part, Black Hat SEO Demystified Part III: Afterthought