Detecting Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Black hat seo techniques involve employing specific techniques banned by the major search engines to enhance a site's ranking higher than it would normally appear.

Common Black Hat Search Engine Optimization Techniques

• Cloaking
• Search Engine Spamming
• Link Farms

Website Cloaking

Cloaking is a way of serving the search engine spiders a different optimized page to what the website visitor sees. So if the Google spider / bot comes along to index your page it will serve it a page specially designed for Google. Software that resides on the webserver serves the spiders a 'content-oriented' page optimized to each of the specific search engines. Often times these cloaked pages will contain information that is not contained on the pages that a website visitor would see. Another technique that is also considered cloacking is to have the webserver redirections spiders and browsers to different web pages or even websites. Serving up different HTML to the spiders vs. the website visitors is prohibited by every major search engine.

Search Engine Spamming

Some unscrupulous website owners will create multiple websites with the same website content. These sites will then be interlinked and submitted to the major search engines. The end result is the websites occupy multiple positions for the keyword phrases being targeted.

Link Farms

Link farms are sites's who's sole purpose is to generate inbound links for other websites. At one time the number of incoming links could significantly increase a website's ranking. Google along with other search engines are now begining to ignore incoming links from link farms or even penalize sites who are listed on link farms.

Detecting Cloaking

Have you ever done a search and found that the top listings had nothing to do with the content you were searching for? Have you ever had a competitor who's search engine ranking is much higher than the content of their sites should allow? These sites are probably using cloaking techniques to mask their true content to the search engines.

The easiest way to detect cloaking is to use the Mozilla FireFox browser with the User Agent Switcher extension. Once this browser is installed and extension is installed, simply configure a new users agent with the following information.

Description: GoogleBot
User Agent: Googlebot/2.x

When you select this profile from within FireFox, your web browser will tell sites that you visit that you are the GoogleBot crawler. If you find a site that is different when using this user agent instead of the default, you have found a website using cloaking techniques.

Reporting Abuse

If you suspect that a site is using black hat techniques, you can report it to the major search engines.

Google http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Yahoo! http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/abuse/cgi_abuse
DMOZ http://report-abuse.dmoz.org/