Black Hat SEO

Just watching the search engines mess things up in 2006 has got quite a few webmasters thinking of turning to the dark side. Many consider that after playing by the rules and getting hit and dumped in the serps then what else is left. If you can't beat them join them?

Black hat seo has many levels and it can be argued that if your building pages for the spiders and not your users then your wearing a black hat. Hardcore black hat is defined by the webmaster who spends his time trying to "beat" the search engine alogs with any and every method they can. Text loading and keyword stuffing, alt tag stuffing, link spam are very basic old school methods, massive auto generated data base driven million page plus sites are part of the current wave of search engine spam, scraper sites harvest or scrape content from other sites all over the web and then reproduce it as their own. Webmasters put faith in the search engines to deal with these types of issues however during the last 12 months there have been massive fluctuations in the search results.

The results of loosing pages, rank and traffic can be a disaster for an online business, seeing a black hat scraper site take your place at the top of the search results for may webmasters may just be the final straw. A cynic will say that there is money in volatile search, if you can't rely on organic search traffic then you need to look towards PPC traffic to sustain your traffic. We now have share holder driven search results.