phil.cook on 22 November 2024 I was reading a post last week on SEOMoz – https://www.seomoz.org/blog/beyond-good-and-evil-in-seo-11331 which I found interesting as it discusses why some firms may look to use black hat SEO techniques in order to “manipulate” the search engine results page. You could say that all SEO’s do this in the standard techniques […]

Keyword stuffing is an undesirable SEO practice which many search engines consider as being a black hat technique. Google refer to it as loading a webpage with keywords in order to influence their rankings. They believe that it affects a users experience negatively which in their books does more harm to rankings than good. They […]

Ethical SEO is also referred to as White Hat SEO. It entails the practice of ethical, moral and correct techniques used for the purpose of optimizing search engine rankings. In terms of natural or organic search engine optimization, ethical or white hat techniques are vital. Major search engines can easily spot any techniques that falls […]

Peter on 22 February 2024 From a purely business perspective many of the SEO techniques described as ’spam’ don’t actually seem that ‘bad.’ Particularly if you have a new site, dragging your pages up through the rankings can take months of hard work. If you’ve got a product you know your customers will want, why […]

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 […]