Atelier Studios

Black Hat SEO techniques are those employed by those looking to manipulate their sites rankings in the search engines by using methods not approved by Google. These methods are generally temporary and if they are caught by the search engines they can lose all of their rankings in Google.

Some of the main Black Hat SEO techniques include.

Keyword stuffing: This is where site owners place an unnatural amount of keywords on the page so that the search engines believe that the site is extremely relevant to the subject.

Hidden or invisible Text: This is where site owners insert a keyword over and over in the site and set it so that it is either a tiny size or the same colour as the background so that the human eye cannot naturally see it. 

Meta tag stuffing: This is where users repeatedly insert the same keywords over and over into the meta keyword and title tag of the page. This has caused the search engines to place less weight on the Meta tag.

Link farms: A community of site owners who pass links around each others sites to build surreptitious organic links between them.

Hidden links: Placing links on the site either where the user cannot see them. This helps increase the link popularity of an individual site

Spam blogs: Creating fake blogs with the aim of purely recommending or linking to the main site.

Comment spam: This is where users may make fake comments on blog sites, wikis or guest books with links to their site in. This is one of the most difficult to monitor if the comment has some validity 

Wiki spam: By editing the content of open source sites (such as Wikipedia) users can place a great number of links to their site. This is often unrelated information and is obvious to spot.