To answer the question: Yes. But is this something that you really want to do? There are many Internet Marketers and website owners out there who use Black-Hat SEO Tactics to improve their search engine ranking. These tactics are not legitimate “tactics”. While some may work in the short term, eventually search engines such as Google catch on to you. And when they do, they will penalized your website and sometimes even ban your site. While talking about these tactics, in no way am I promoting or encouraging anyone to use and practice these tactics. You will have to ask yourself, is the short-term gain you might achieve worth getting banned or penalized by these search engines?
Webmasters may attempt to trick search engines into getting a better website ranking with Black-Hat SEO also known as Spamdexing. It is clearly stated in many of the search engines terms and conditions that this method is strictly prohibited. Violators use methods such as doorway pages, invisible text, interlinking, keyword spamming and a few other methods. Believe it or not, the websites that use these methods fall out of the top rankings as fast as they climb and sometimes they never reach the top positions. So if one was to analyze this rationally, Black-Hat SEO is very inefficient and time consuming. Due to nature of the countless amounts of tactics used, only a selected few will be focused on in this posting.
Invisible text
This used to be one of the top methods in the early days. Invisible text is created by setting your text the same color as the background or a color very close to it. One of the first things I learned while learning to create websites was to never put white text on a white background. In fact, you don’t want to even use colors that are closely related such as light yellow background and white text. Search Engines are not dumb, they will figure out that there is no contrast between the two colors. While major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, can easily detect hidden text set to the same color as a background: Some webmasters attempt to get around this by creating an image file the same color as the text and setting the image file as the background. This Black-Hat SEO trick is undetectable at the moment. Using it is considered spam. And be careful, if one of your competitor’s were to see you using this, they may report you – This has the potential to get you blacklisted.
Cloaking
Cloaking refers to showing one page to the search engine and another to the human visitor on your website. There are way too many methods of cloaking to list them all and some still work and are not detectable by search engines.
Keyword Stuffing
Going back to the early days on the web, this tactic was used quite often. Search Engines were not as smart back then as they are now. A webmaster or website owner would simple fill a page with as many relevant keywords as they could and it would result in a good search engine ranking. Surprisingly, this is still one the most common methods used today to spam search engines. This is also a technique that is closely associated with the hidden text Black-Hat SEO technique.
Doorway pages
A page without any real value to it visitors, doorway pages are created specifically for the purpose of ranking well in the search engines by targeting a specific keyword phrase or phrases. The goal of these pages is to hope that once a visitor lands there, they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Doorway pages are still a popular choice for some SEO firms, even though major search engines such as Google has been cracking down these websites. To reiterate, as mentioned in the above tactics, using a method such as this one will more than likely land you in hot water with the search engines and eventually get penalized and/or banned!
Interlinking
This is a tactic I am fully aware of from visiting many forums and reading what was being discussed by webmasters, Internet Marketers and other website owners. The value of incoming links has become more important over the last few years. The practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build their overall link popularity is now a common practice by many who try to cheat their way to the top in the search engines. When done correctly, this approach is more difficult to detect than any of the previously mentioned Black-Hat SEO methods. While this tactic is still undetectable, it is still spam and eventually they will get exposed and if your website or websites is linked to this practice you will get penalized.
Over the years I have made a conscious effort to learn how to properly optimize my websites using the proper and acceptable methods of SEO. I have seen the benefits as my sites have relatively maintained their rankings over the years – Even the ones I have not updated.
