Just like email spam, SE spamming reduces the quality of experience on the internet, by providing poor results when performing a search. And just as much as you hate an inbox full of unsolicited commercials, SEs hate this form of spamming as it reduces their credibility of providing relevant searches. This kind of spamming is what is referred to as black hat within Search Engine Optimization (SEO) circles.



As an internet business person, it is most prudent to be aware of these techniques. Considering that you will tend to out-source a significant part of your work, being aware of black hat can help you wade through service providers that can get you internet business banned from search engines. Black hat may shoot your website through the rankings but as Bruce Clay, one of the leading SEOs on the internet today advices," My advice is to always play in the center of the acceptable area and do not experiment with new ways to fool the engines and earn overnight rankings." You need to know where the center is if you are going to out-source any part of your website's SEO. Below are some three tactics that can get you website banned, fast.

One of the earliest techniques were "doorway pages". Back in 2000 the "doorway page" was commonly used to assist the unsophisticated SEs in locating and spidering content. As SEs developed and abuse of the technique increased, doorways were considered spam. Doorways involved creating two pages for the same URL (Link). When the SE spider visited the URL, it would be served a highly SE optimized page that was full of unreadable gibberish. But when an internet visitor came by, they would be served the second page that was readable. The doorways could differentiate an internet user from a SE spider using the IP addresses. IP address is a unique number assigned to each computer on the net. SEs do have their own known IPs.

Another tactic is use of redirects. Some unscrupulous SEO companies still use this technique with their clients' websites. This is a less technical method that can be applied even by an amateur webmaster. It involves putting a particular piece of code in a page. This code redirects a visitor to a page to another different page automatically. It was a handy code used to redirect visitor when a page was moved within a website. Its abuse involves writing a highly optimized page that was visitor unfriendly and redirecting to the page you want the visitor to see. Nearly all SEs approach redirect scripts suspiciously.

A third technique is linking to what Google calls "bad neighborhoods". Since it was known SEs use in-pointing links to determine ranking, black hats have looked for ways to increase their in-pointing links. They use pages where they exchange links with hundreds of other sites regardless of their topics. These link-pages are commonly referred to as link farms.