As the major search engines strive to pull more market share from searchers seeking relevant and up to the minute search results, there are several black hat SEO companies out there seeking to position their clients through deceitful practices.  These practices violate the terms of use on the major search engines including Google, Bing & Yahoo. The search engines are constantly evolving to help combat blackhats, and the blackhats are constantly evolving to combat the new algorithms. Some of these practices involve (but are not limited to) the following:

Cloaking: Cloaking is the process of sending the web site visitor to one page while serving the search engines with another page, typically stuffed with keywords, etc.  There are ways to spot cloaking, but it involves adding an ‘agent switcher’ plugin in the Firefox browser:  http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/000821.html

Invisible Text: One other (more dated) unethical SEO tactic is to ‘hide’ text on the page so that the search engines see that text as they crawl the page.  The text is written for the search engines and typically stuffed with keywords.  You can spot invisible text by using your mouse and highlighting areas that are other wise blank: this can highlight all of the ‘invisible’ words.

Doorway Pages: A doorway page is simply a page written solely for search engines and NOT for the user.  Doorway pages are not usually seen by the end user and only by search engines.  They are typically stuffed with links pointing to the target domain name and crammed with keywords and spam copy.

Keyword Stuffing: This is the process of just jamming your web pages full of your target keywords, whether out in the open or hidden.  This is easily spotted by any user who attempts to read the copy and notes it is not written for human beings, but for search engines.

There are many tactics including some off site SEO tricks involving link farms, automated bots, etc. but the above is a sample of unethical blackhat practices and how to spot them.

The SEO team at On Target Web Solutions only employees white hat search engine optimization tactics.  Have questions? Give us a call today: 407-830-4550. On Target Web Solutions, The Internet Marketing Experts.

I’m a huge fan of Matt Cutts and I realize that not everyone is riveted by SEO, but I live it and breathe it daily: Here’s a great video (it’s a long one…) from Matt Cutts at WordCamp. Matt is head of the spam division at Google.