I have noticed a growing trend among webmasters who are desperately seaking top search engine positions for their website. A few years ago Blackhat SEO was seen as some kind of evil practice which would lead you directly to hell. But over the last few months it seems Blackhat SEO has become quite popular, and many webmasters are now using blackhat methods to get their website ranked!



I don't condone or use these methods myself, but i think it is worth studying the methods used by the blackhats, or as they're sometimes known Search Engine Spammers. Firstly lets take a look at each type of SEO and explain what each one does.

Black Hat SEO:

This is what people have come to refer to as search engine spammers. They create low quality documents and sites with content generated by software

and rank them highly for target keywords. These sites add no value to the web because they provide no fresh content, no extra information and generally very little except monetization tactics for the site owner.

Thats what black hat SEOs are after: money. The tactics used to make it happen are frowned upon by most mainstream webmasters as well as the search engines. Some of it is borderline unethical while most is not. Its a judgment call I am not here to make

White Hat SEO:

In my book, white hat search engine optimization is a contradiction in and of itself. If you are a white hat, you are doing everything according to Googles

rules. That means you are building sites purely with the user in mind and with total disregard for the search engines. Google puts it this way "build the site as if search engines didnt exist". That

makes you a white hat. If thats what youre doing, then you are not doing any kind of optimization at all.

White hat? Only by accident: it doesnt really exist.

Gray Hat SEO:

This ranges from very light to black hat and could in fact encompass all SEOs. It really just becomes a question of the level of aggressiveness you are willing

to use in your tactics as well as the content sources you will use. An example is syndicating other peoples content on your blog with just enough of your own text to make it pass the duplicate content filters.

Ok so that's a summary of each of the hat colours, lets look at the darkside now, and check out some of the methods they use.

As you may be aware most blackhat seo's don't usually create their own content/websites by hand. They use software/scripts to automatically create hundreds and thousands of pages use content generators. The best known content generators are:

RssEvolution

RSSGM

Fantomas ShadowMaker

So what about promotion? White Hat SEO's usually ask other website owners for reciprocal links and submit their links to link directories. Well that's not how the blackhats do it! Blackhat SEO's refer to their way of gaining backlinks as "link dumping". This basically means placing as many links on interactive websites as possible. When i say interactive i mean websites that run scripts such as blogs, guestbooks and forums .etc.

Comment Spam:

In it's purest form this basically refers to leaving comments on blogs, with a link back to their website. But you can imagine how long this process would be searching for blogs and commenting on each of them, so the blackhats usually buy or more often code their own software to automate this process. The effect is hundreds and thousands of backlinks to their websites.

Forum Spam:

There are millions of forums online, and blackhats target them too. Much like comment spam, they will basically just register at forums (sometimes not needed if guest accounts are allowed) and spread their

links to their website across threads. Now as always blackhats want to make this process automated so they use a program known as Xrumer to automatically register and post threads at thousands of forums.

Guest Book Spam:

This is an old skool method of link dumping used by blackhats but it is still widely used, it basically means using software to automatically post comment on guestbooks. Although this is the old way of doing it, many still use this technique because a lot of older guestbook software doesn't use the "No Follow" tag.

Trackback Spam:

One of the newer link dumping techniques is trackback spam. It was invented so that blogs can serve as conversation forums. When a website links to a blog post, the blog will recognize this link and create a link back to the website. This is done so that readers of the blog can access relevant content or see what others have written that relates to the blog post they just read. This is a very efficient blackhat way of getting targeted one-way backlinks. Much more so than the methods above.

So that's a quick summary of how Blackhat SEO's go about getting ranked. I don't recommend using these practices as they often lead to search engines banning your website from the SERP's.