Black Hat Techniques that Don’t Work Anymore

In some cases we’re told what we need to know to rank in a search engine listing. But in many cases, changes and factors are applied without us knowing, which can be frustrating. In most cases, the search engines are trying to thwart “black hat” techniques, so they don’t necessarily want people to know they were on to them, so they penalize and change their algorithm to handle it without telling anyone.

While we know at a high level, how search engines work, we don’t fully understand the details of it.

All of the major search engines have a “web spam” team of some sort which try to figure out how people are trying to “game” the system and prevent it.

Here are some examples of techniques that don’t work anymore:

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is the process of adding keywords, especially ones what are not relevant to the topic of the page/site in hopes that the search engine will think that the site is really about that topic.

For example, let’s say someone is selling some shady “health pills”. Well, people don’t go searching for “Shady Health Pills”, so the website isn’t getting much traffic. Instead, they decide that people like sports cars, so they put all types of sport car terms at the bottom of one or more of their pages. They list makes and models (Ford Mustang, iRoc Z80,) features (V8, double cam engine, fuel injected), and other things which people might search for.

They’ll take these terms and hide them, often at the bottom of the page, in a really small font, or color the text with CSS so it blends into the background.

body { 
  color: black;
  background-color: white;
}
.spammy-text {
  color: white;
  background-color: white;
  font-size: 6px;
}

Of course, to make the page seem legitimate, they’ll post a photo of a guy holding their “shady health pills” while leaning against a sports car. Because that will fool people, right?

Luckily, search engines are good at determining hidden text now a days, and provide less relevance to text at the bottom of the page.

Most of the page which counts for Search Engines will be towards the top of the page.

Hiding Links

Hiding links can be an internal or external linking issue. Generally, the process is to use either something really small, like a period (.), or use CSS to hide a link, by making it not look like a link. Generally this is done to get links from external sources and may be used in conjunction with hacking another website, or someone using a a guest post to promote their site.

Internally, it can be used to generate links so search bots can go about the process of finding new links and new pages.

People stated using CSS to make links look like regular text when Google started to use the anchor text as one of the hints for how to rank items.

body { 
  color: black;
  background-color: white;
}

.hide_link {
  color: black;
  text-decoration: none;
  cursor: default;
}

Sometimes this will be done with inline styles, and that makes it easy for search engines to figure out what you’re doing.

Heading Abuse

While using headings is good, putting all of your keywords, or all of your content in h1 and h2 tags diminishes what is important. i.e. if everything is important, then nothing is important. Even if, or maybe especially if, you modify your CSS to display it like normal text, you will run into issues with Search Engines and they will either ignore it, or penalize your for it.

Serving Different Pages to Google Bot

Another formally common technique was to see who was coming to your page. If it was a google bot, they’d serve up something different. Often simpler content without images, etc, so that the search engine could access the site faster and focused on the content.

There are examples however, of people serving completely different content to search engine bots. This was clearly a problem, as you could get people talking about sports cars on the page, instead of the “Shady Health Pills” which is what a normal person would see.

How did they know, well when you make a URL request, within the HTTP Headers is browser information, as well as your IP address, which causes issues.

Now Google periodically checks with bots that look like a person, and/or from different IP address., comparing the results to see if someone is posting up different content.

Black Hat Techniques that Don’t Work Anymore was originally found on Access 2 Learn