Sunday, September 6, 2009

Interlinking

Interlinking
As incoming links became more important for search engine positioning the practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build the overall link popularity of them all became a common practice. This tactic is more difficult to detect than others when done "correctly" (we cannot give the method for "correct" interlinking here as it's still undetectable at the time of this writing and we don't want to provide a means to spam engines). This tactic is difficult to detect from a user standpoint unless you end up with multiple sites in the top positions on the search engines in which case it is likely that you will be reported.

Duplicate Sites

Duplicate Sites
A throwback tactic that rarely works these days. When affiliate programs became popular many webmasters would simply create a copy of the site they were promoting, tweak it a bit, and put it online in hopes that it would outrank the site it was promoting and capture their sales. As the search engines would ideally like to see unique content across all of their results this tactic was quickly banned and the search engines have methods for detecting and removing duplicate sites from their index. If the site is changed just enough to avoid automatic detection with hidden text or the such, you can once again be reported to the search engines and be banned that way.

Redirecting

Redirecting
Redirects are commonly used along with doorway pages, or spam pages filled with advertising. They are designed to take a user to a page that they did not want to go to. These can be both server side redirects, or client side redirects. Vicious redirect pages often get the user into an infinite loop that are difficult to break from.

Link Farming

Link Farming
Another name for a link farm is a free-for-all site. The objective of these sites is strictly to generate inbound links to your site at any cost. This will typically work in the short term, but hurt your site (or get it banned) long-term.
These kinds of sites are also known as mutual admiration societies.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword Stuffing
Filling your page with long lists of keywords in an attempt to rank higher for those words. You don't view this as high quality content, and neither will Google. This method is typically accompanied with the Hidden Text and Redirecting black hat methods

Invisible Text or Hidden Text

Invisible Text or Hidden Text
This Black Hat method manifests itself in many forms. One method is to put lists of keywords in white text on a white background in hopes of attracting more search engine spiders. Another method is to embed and overload keywords into unseen places that crawlers look will get you banned as well. Places like alt tags, comments, JavaScript tags, noframe tags, div tags that are hidden, etc.

Comment Spamming

Comment Spamming
This method is implemented by leaving comments on sites with high PageRanks. These comments can be in the form of blog comments, guestbook entries, forum submissions, wiki pages, etc. The comments are filled with high density keywords, and have links back to the spamming site.