Black Hat SEO – A Bad Idea Disguised As A Cunning Plan

Since the development of Search Engine Optimisation as a concept, there has been a fairly obvious temptation for some people to try to rig the system in their favor by using the principles of SEO in a less-than-honest way. Because the idea of SEO is they keywords create cash, the idea that has occurred to a lot of people can best be summed up in the following sentence: “If they want keyword volume, we’ll give them keyword volume”. This tends to occur in the shape of website text that contains nothing but keywords.

Of course, this means that the website will be scarcely readable, if it is readable at all, but the trick is usually applied by webmasters who don’t really care if you actually read what is on the site. Usually they will use it as a landing page that immediately redirects you to the site they want you to read. It will happen instantly and you will not see the landing page, but it will have done its job. For the reader it may be little more than an inconvenience, but for other people operating in the same niche, it is cheating.

The main reason that tricks like this are a bad idea has only a small amount to do with the fact that it is cheating. In actual fact, it is incredibly limited as an SEO tool because Google and other search engines check for such tricks and will relegate any such site in their rankings – so not only is it dishonest, it is also ineffective, which is what will really stick in the craw of the people doing it.

The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #1 “Hidden Text”

Anyone with a basic understanding of search engine optimization will know that text on a website plays a large part in how you are ranked in search engines. In fact, it could be argued that the textual content of a website is actually the most important thing for search engines.

It’s therefore natural for the cunning mind to wonder if it’s possible to introduce sections of ‘hidden text’. Imagine you’re not the best writer in the world, and you don’t want to have to spend a lot of money outsourcing content creation. Yet at the same time, you’re aware of the importance that search engines place on textual content. So rather than writing poor articles yourself, trying to jam your keywords in, you can simply write the keywords into a spare section of your website – and then change the font color so it is the same, or virtually the same, as the background of the page. Suddenly, your website is stuffed with keywords, but all without having to publish poor articles or ruin the look and feel of your website in general.

This practice goes by a variety of names, including font matching and keyword stuffing. However, whatever you call it, it’s a bad idea.

Why? Well, the reason is obvious – it’s a cheat. Google, and the other major search engines, place an importance on text content because they want their search results to be relevant. Hidden text defeats the point of this, and if you’re caught doing it, you will have your website banned from the search engine – for good. So don’t do it.