Despite their name, you won't know the work of black hat SEOs by the color of their headgear. But whether you're wondering about a competitor's website or uncertain whether your own SEO is cutting corners, it's important to be able to recognize some of the more common tricks out there, especially if it's your website on the line. Because the search engines will eventually catch up to you, and punishment can be brutal.
Before we go any further, I need to make two points clear. First, I am not advocating any of the tactics below. Using them is unethical and doing so can land you in hot water with the search engines. Second, none of the sources cited in this article are black hats, nor do they advocate the use of these tactics.
Now, with those caveats in mind, here are some commonly used black hat tactics, and how to spot them.
Chameleon effect
This tactic involves hiding keyword-rich text on page without making it visible to site visitors. Sometimes this is also known as "keyword stuffing." But regardless, the net result is that some sites get search traffic they really don't deserve.
"It is done by styling the color of your text so that it is the same exact color of your background," says Miguel Salcido, VP of operations from eVisibility. "[The chameleon effect] is not recognizable to the naked eye. It allows the site owner to keep what they feel is a visually appealing site, while at the same time adding the content to it that is necessary for the search engines."
Black hat SEOs also try this same tactic by jamming loads of unrelated keywords into a site's meta data.
How do you spot it? "You can detect hidden text on a web page simply by hitting Ctrl+A," Salcido explains. "What this does is highlight all images and text on the page. This will highlight any hidden text, uncovering the often ugly truth. If search engines catch a site using hidden text, you can be sure that they will penalize it. The gains made by using hidden text by no means outweigh the potential losses."
Code swapping
When a page achieves a high natural search rank, some black hat SEOs employ a tactic known as code swamping, which allows them to substitute a second, illegitimate page in its place. In effect, the practice is like stealing a coveted place in a very long line. The substituted page rides on the coattails of the original page, which likely offered highly relevant information for a given set of keywords.
How do you spot it? To detect code swapping, Ted Rooke, director of search engine marketing at Nurun, recommends a cloaking detector tool available at Linkvendor.com.
According to Rooke, the tool allows you to see a top-to-bottom comparison of what a search bot sees versus what's available to the naked eye. If you find any discrepancies, there's a good chance that a black hat has swapped a page.
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