Is there such a thing as Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat search engine optimization, or spamdexing, is an unethical SEO technique that manipulates page ranking. If your site is caught, you will be blacklisted from Google – it means, no pages in your site will be indexed by the search engines. Black hat SEO basically cheats the rules of the search engine, and it has a poor user experience.

These techniques actually bring immediate visibility to your site but sooner or later you will be banned from various search engines. Black hat SEO is a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

Here are some common black hat SEO approaches.

• Keyword Stuffing – stuffing irrelevant keywords and phrases in your website will get you penalized by the search engines. Usually, black hat SEO practitioners stuff keywords on the meta tags and on the content so many times that it can be picked up by the search engine spiders. Learn the proper ways to put keywords in your site pages. Lack of targeted keywords constitutes lack of traffic.
• Hidden Page Text – this is a sneaky approach. This is putting the keywords in a white text on a white background – invisible to the site visitors but clearly visible to the search engine spiders. The purpose of this technique is to attract more search engine spiders. These keywords are invisible considering that it is irrelevant to the page content leaving the web visitors disappointed with the result page. The Google Guide for Webmasters urges to make pages for users and not for search engines. Do not, in any way, deceive your users. If you don’t want to be blacklisted by Google and other search engines, then don’t even think about doing it.
• Doorway Page – it is a dummy page that the web user will never see. It is just a trick for search engine spiders so it will index the site higher. This doorway page is stuff with keywords and links to attract search visits. When the user land into a doorway page, he will be redirected automatically to another page unrelated to what they are searching for.

Black hat SEO is very tempting especially that these approaches work temporarily – it will do improve your site in the search rankings however, will it be worth it when you get banned by search engines for using such unethical techniques?