Jon Hogg on 16 July 2024 What is cloaking? I’m glad you asked. Put simply, cloaking is when a website shows different content to a search engine spider than it does to normal visitor. Why would a site do this? It’s almost always a blackhat SEO technique that aims to show search engines a keyword […]

John on 20 February 2024 Bing’s toolbar has been the subject of controversy lately, with Google accusing it as being a tool to help Microsoft’s search engine to copy some of their search results. A real search engine marketing war of words – Bing strenuously denied this accusation, and have updated their toolbar with a […]

There are plenty of professionals out there willing to use black hat techniques to boost the traffic of your website. These kinds of results can be tempting to go for, but, as any good SEO consultant will tell you, the effects are temporary and can harm you in the long run. With so many black-hat […]

Black Hat techniques are considered Black Hat for good reason. They will at some stage get your website penalized or banned. Trying to trick search engines into higher rankings is the basis of Black Hat techniques. The most common methods are doorway pages, hidden text, keyword spamming or stuffing, interlinking and a host of other […]

John on 16 February 2024 “We have no record of ever having received a violation notification from Google before last week when the unauthorized links came to our attention. If we had, we would have worked quickly to remedy the situation, as we are doing now. Obviously, we are disappointed that Google has reduced our […]

As with everything else in life, there is white, black and grey in search engine optimisation. As always, grey areas and in this instance grey hat SEO, is legitimate in certain cases, but can also make your life as a webmaster incredibly difficult. There is a fine line between black and white and unless you […]

Excess is not a topic brought up very often in the world of SEO. Usually, SEO professionals are anxious to explain the range of techniques that can be applied to a site. The restrictions that should be placed on a search engine optimisation campaign are very rarely discussed, if ever. Yet there is always a […]

There have been uncountable articles written on the subject of black hat SEO practices. Just as many warnings as reputable optimisers give website owners, their efforts are undermined by those that tell you any black hat optimiser worth his salt will counteract each of the search engine measures put in place to stop these practices. […]

Peter on 29 July 2024 Search engine optimisation experts are constantly advising against the use of black hat SEO methods and yet there are still some business owners which choose this approach. One of the reasons why so many site owners still fall into this trap is because unethical SEO companies make black hat SEO […]

Jonathon Oates on 27 June 2024 Yelp is the Yellow Pages of the future; no more are phone numbers and Web addresses the only information available on the move,  now a wealth of contact information, customer reviews, maps and more are just a click or tap or two away! “So, Yelp’s not new!” you say? […]

‘Black hat’ is an old-fashioned term that comes from the early days of movies, particularly westerns. The guy in the black hat is the bad guy, taking advantage of the weak or naive, and doing his best to foil the hero in the white hat. This is quite a dramatic picture. It certainly doesn’t seem […]