Black Hat Online Marketing Tactics: What Exactly Are They?

By Aisling M. Brennan
Account Director

The recent account of car manufacturer BMW's expulsion from Google's organic results listings for using black hat optimisation techniques made headlines throughout the mainstream media. As a result it has raised the issue of what tactics are considered "black hat" and what are "white hat".

Below I've outlined the main techniques used by black hat marketers in an attempt to trick the engines' algorithms. Warning: these are considered highly unethical and are violations of many search engine guidelines, including Google's, and will most likely result in expulsion from the search engine results pages.

1. Doorway Pages
   This was BMW's particular offense. They displayed one page--a "doorway"--to Google's search crawler (GoogleBot), but another to human visitors. The doorway was loaded with the keywords and created to appeal to the crawlers (i.e. it was gibberish). Doorway pages are generally automatically generated to target numerous keywords and tend not to make sense when read by the human eye.
   
2. Keyword Stuffing
   This is probably one of the most commonly abused forms of search engine spam. Essentially keyword stuffing involves continued repetition of a targeted keyword phrase on a page to convince the search engine that the page is relevant and important. This text is usually placed at the bottom of a page, and very often, in very small font.
3. Hidden Text or Hidden Links
   This is text that is the same colour as the background of the website, or very close to it. While it's invisible to the human eye, it's read by the search engine crawlers and as a result in keyword stuffing.
4. Cloaking
   Also known as stealth, cloaking is a method of presenting different information to the search engines than a human visitor would see.
5. Redirects
   Redirects, or as Google calls them "sneaky redirects" are also considered violations of the guidelines. If you’re using JavaScript redirects, don’t obfuscate the code as this raises suspicions that you’re doing things after lots of deliberate consideration.
6. Link Farms
   Don't waste your time or money signing up to sites that promise thousands of links within 24 hours, aka link farms. This is seen as an attempt to trick the engines about a web sites' popularity and will result in immediate expulsion.
7. Duplicate Content
   Avoid creating multiple pages, subdomains or domains with substantially duplicate content.