I have spent a lot of time outlining the right things to do for SEO – things that are typically called White Hat SEO. Some of the practices I have written about would even lean a bit towards the Gray Hat arena. I have even discussed the 3 different hats of a search engine optimizer. But I have never outlined Black Hat SEO Practices. These are content practices, techniques, or methodologies that are sure to get your blog or web site banned from one, or all, of the major search engines. I list these here to help draw the line between what is acceptable, and what is not acceptable to the search engines. I do not list these techniques to advocate Black Hat practices. Use These Techniques At Your Own Risk!

1. Astroturfing

This is when a false public relations campaign or fake social media in the blogosphere generate increased attention to a site, blog, or wiki.
* Livingston Buzz – Astroturfing on the Dark Side of the Moon

2. Buying Expired Domains

Domains that have expired can carry a large page rank. By purchasing the domain, throwing up repetitive content, and linking to your other web sites and domains, you can use link juice to distribute the page rank to those other sites.

3. Cloaking

Cloaking is when a site is designed to show one set of content to your users, while showing a completely different set of content to crawlers, robots, and spiders. This is considered misrepresenting your content.

4. Comment Spamming

This method is implemented by leaving comments on sites with high PageRanks. These comments can be in the form of blog comments, guestbook entries, forum submissions, wiki pages, etc. The comments are filled with high density keywords, and have links back to the spamming site.

5. Doorway Pages

A doorway page is a “fake” page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher. This method is dependent on useragent sniffing.

6. Fake CEO / Celebrity Avatars

This is when a blogger or forums user registers as if they are a person if significance, i.e. a CEO or celebrity. These people leave damaging messages that can sway a user in a specific direction about a product or service. This can swing the other way. A Celebrity or high level executive can act as an anonymous user to leave disparaging remarks about another person, company, or product, drive traffic to their site, and ultimately increase sales.
* CopyWrite, Ink – Silencing Crisis: Whole Foods Market, Inc.

7. Google Bombing

This is accomplished by creating links on multiple sites linking to the same page with the same text. The text link may not necessarily be relevant to the linked site, thus creating the Google Bomb. The most common Google Bomb can be seen by searching “miserable failure” and seeing sites for George Bush appear at the top of the results page.

8. Google Bowling

Google is penalizing (or even banning) sites that purchase site-wide links. A site-wide link is a link that is on every page of the entire site. Google Bowling is buying site-wide links as a competitor to get them banned.
* Web Pro News – Google Bowling: How Competitors Can Sabotage You; What Google Should Do About It

9. Invisible Text or Hidden Text

This Black Hat method manifests itself in many forms. One method is to put lists of keywords in white text on a white background in hopes of attracting more search engine spiders. Another method is to embed and overload keywords into unseen places that crawlers look will get you banned as well. Places like alt tags, comments, JavaScript tags, noframe tags, div tags that are hidden, etc.

10. Interlinking

When multiple web sites are built by the same person or company, with similar content, with links pointing back and forth between them, in an attempt to increase each others’ page ranks.

11. Keyword Stuffing

Filling your page with long lists of keywords in an attempt to rank higher for those words. You don’t view this as high quality content, and neither will Google. This method is typically accompanied with the Hidden Text and Redirecting black hat methods.

12. Link Farming

Another name for a link farm is a free-for-all site. The objective of these sites is strictly to generate inbound links to your site at any cost. This will typically work in the short term, but hurt your site (or get it banned) long-term.
These kinds of sites are also known as mutual admiration societies.

13. Redirecting

Redirects are commonly used along with doorway pages, or spam pages filled with advertising. They are designed to take a user to a page that they did not want to go to. These can be both server side redirects, or client side redirects. Vicious redirect pages often get the user into an infinite loop that are difficult to break from.

14. Scraper Sites

Also known as Made-for-AdSense Sites, these pages are similar to spam pages, except that they are designed to scrape search engine results and dynamically “create” content pages. These are also used in conjunction with do

15. Selling PageRank

Sites can explicitly sell “advertising” (read inbound links) to your site. This essentially distributes some of the PageRank to the newly linked site, and its position in search engine results pages. This has been in the news a lot lately. Google has dropped the PageRank of anyone doing this. Both the buyer and seller of the link are dropped in PageRank.

16. Shill Blogs, Spam Blogs, or Splogs

Spam Blogs are when one person is paid to act as a fan for those who hired them. Generating a source of positive feedback and link sharing will increase inbound traffic and PageRank. These methods are similar in effect to a link farm.
* Business Week – Wal-Mart’s Jim and Laura: The Real Story

17. Spam Pages

Spam Pages are web pages that rank well for specific keywords, but actually hold no content. They are typically full of advertisements, listings to other sites, or are part of a pay-per-click scam.

18. Sybil Attacks

When a single user creates multiple identities to generate additional traffic. This could be in the form of multiple web sites with similar, if not identical, content. This also could be in the form of multiple social bookmark accounts, multiple comments, etc.

19. Wiki Spam

Wikis, just like blogs, are intended to be an easy way to create and organize content for non-developers (read anyone). But the distributed and open editability of wikis make the susceptible to spamming. By placing links in wikis back to the spam site, you hijack the link juice of the wiki, pass the page rank on, and increase results frequency. The subject of the wiki page is typically irrelevant. This is why large wikis like wikipedia have added the nofollow attribute to all of their links.

20. Resources

• http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/tactics/black-hat.htm
• http://seoblackhat.com/
• http://www.syndk8.net/
• http://websitehelpers.com/seo/blackhat.html
• http://websearch.about.com/od/seononos/a/spamseo.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing

Are there any other Black Hat SEO techniques that you know of? Any other Black Hat resources that you know of? What do you think of Black Hat SEO? Let me know what you think by leaving me a comment.

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to get content published to the Internet.  Everyone, from the average Joe to the Corporate Communications Specialist wants to see their blog and their most recent posts on the Google results page.  But, just like SEO for any other web site, it takes time, effort, and patience.  Here is a collection of tips gathered from around the blogosphere on how to optimize your blog for search engines.

Content

• Content is always king.  Make sure your content is new, fresh, engaging, and relevant.
• Update your blog frequently.  The more it is updated, the more your content will be indexed.
• Stick with your blog – don’t get discouraged!
• Use an interesting title for your blog and each of your blog posts. 
• Limit each of your posts to one topic, keeping your pages focused.
• Keep your posts not too short, and not too long.  This keeps your readers interested and returning.
• Provide a list of your top 10 blog posts on your site.
• Make sure your tags, categories, labels, etc. also make good keywords.
• Use your keywords as often as possible, but only in a natural context.
• Use a blog service like WordPress, Blogger, etc.  These sites already have high content churn, and attract frequent indexing.
• Make sure that anonymous users can leave comments.  You will get more feedback that way.

Linking

• Increase your inbound links from other sites.
• Link to your own posts that have a similar topic.
• Outbound links to high quality sites help your page rank.

Markup

• Make sure your blog’s HTML is W3C Compliant so that search engines can spider your blog easily.
• Make sure your post titles are live links.
• If your blog supports it, don’t forget to use meta tags in your blog template.
• Use your primary keyword in strategic locations:
• Your blog domain
• In the title of your posts
• In the anchor text of links
• In the alt tags of your images
• In Header tags – H1, H2, H3, etc.
• In bold tags

Your RSS Feed

• Be sure that RSS auto-discovery tags are placed in the header of every page, one for each RSS feed.
• Your RSS feeds should provide full text for each post.
• Maximize the number of blog posts provided in your blog feed.  Typical default is 10, 20 or more is better.
• Provide a feed for every category your blog offers.

Post-Publishing

• Join blog networks and blog directories.
• Let other bloggers know about your site.
• Leave comments on other blogs with links back to your site, particularly industry leaders.
• Contact industry leaders who blog and ask them to cover your story.
• Swap links with other bloggers.
• Submit your site to Ping Servers so that your blog gets indexed faster.
• Some blog services will do this for you.
• If they do not, then use Ping-O-Matic – http://pingomatic.com/ .
• Submit your blog to the top search engines:
• Google – http://www.google.com/addurl/
• Yahoo – http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• Yahoo Directory – http://dir.yahoo.com/
• Yahoo Directory Submit – https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/
• Windows Live Search – http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx
• DMOZ – http://dmoz.org/add.html
• Feedburner is a great way to publish your RSS feed.
• Google Analytics is a great starter tool to measure your site’s activity, and it’s free.

Do you have other tips or resources for bloggers in optimizing their sites for search engines?  Leave me some feedback and let me know.

Resources:

• Scott Hanselman – Blog Interesting – 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking
• Matt Cutts – Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers
• ProBlogger – Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
• BlogHerald – SEO Tips: Increase Page Rank By Revitalizing Your Old Posts
• SearchEngineGuide – Tips for Optimizing Blogs and Feeds 
• JohnTP – 8 Simple SEO Tips for Blogs

A common SEO tip for web developers is to keep your content to markup ratio high.  This is supposed to make the crawling of your site easier, more efficient, and faster.  It is possible, however, that more modern site crawlers like Google ignore code already, since they behave like a text based browser anyway.  However, implementing this as a SEO strategy cannot hurt. In fact, it has benefits for not only SEO reasons, but for general web development practices as well:

• Keeping the amount of code on the page low helps overall site maintenance and usability, focusing on your content. 
• Including CSS and JavaScript in external files increase content-to-code ratio as well as making your site easier to maintain. 
• Having validated HTML code will help the crawlers understand your site , as well as make your code compliant for maximum browser readability and performance.

For more information:

• Phoenix Realm – Why Clean Markup Matters To Your SEO 
• All Your Web – HTML to test Ratio
• SEO Workers – Isn’t the Code to Text Ratio Important for SEO?

So I was reading through some forum postings on SEO and came across a question on highrankings.com about plurals in keywords.  Everyone agreed in the forum posts that including plurals in your keywords will give more accurate search results. 

They recommend testing it yourself.  if you search for “search engine” and search for “search engines” you will get completely different results. 

I poked around some more, and found this great article on searchengineguide.com about plural vs. singular keywords.  Sumantra Roy outlined how each search engine handles the difference between singular and plural keywords.  And all twelve search engines reviewed have different results for singular and plural keyword searches. 

So there you have it.  When building a list of keywords, include singular and plural versions of keywords. 

Optimizing your page for search engines is risky business – one wrong move, and all of a sudden your site is de-listed.  There are three lines you can walk while optimizing your site, each with an increasing level of risk – White Hat, Gray Hat, and Black Hat.

White Hat

SEO experts that follow the path of the White Hat are abiding by the recommendations laid out by the search engines, such as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines , Yahoo’s Directory Help, and MSN Live Search Site Owner Help.  By following these guidelines, your site will slowly climb through the ranks , and there will be no risk of being de-listed.  Most techniques for optimizing content, keywords, and meta tags fall into this category.  Typically White Hat optimizers focus on content and customer first, then optimization second. 

Black Hat

Black Hat SEO is on the other end of the spectrum.  These techniques, if discovered by search engines, will have your site removed from their index.  You will need to make changes to your site to bring you into compliance with their guidelines before they will accept your submissions again.  Black Hat Techniques may move you through the search engine indexes much quicker, but at a higher level of risk.  Techniques for Black Hat optimizers typically leverage techniques such as Google bombing, cloaking, and redirecting. 

Gray Hat

This is not quite what one would expect, i.e. the hat in between.  Gray Hat optimizers are a lighter shade of black more than a darker shade of white.  They are taking advantage of techniques that are not as well defined as Black Hat, or are too new to be well defined as Black Hat.  These SEOs are accepting more risk and using questionable or discouraged techniques, but are not banned by the search engines.  Techniques such as link farms, automated blogging, and gaming social media and web 2.0 sites. 

Your Hat

So the real difference between the different SEO hats is the amount of risk.  If you think about it, the hats are better explained as more of a continuum, with many Shades of SEO.  What are your thoughts about the risk vs. reward of SEO Hats?