If you follow their exact specifications in search engine optimization then this is classified as White Hat techniques.

If you do things that they don't like these are known as Black Hat techniques.

You can imagine what these terms mean by just thinking back to the old cowboy movies where the good guy wore the white hat and the bad guy wore the black hat. So are you a good guy or a bad guy when it comes to search engine optimization?

Some black hat techniques are very obvious and others are simply devious. But you should know some of the basic black hat techniques in order to avoid them. Why? Because if you are caught doing these black hat techniques your website can be banned from the indexes. You will no longer appear in Google or Yahoo or any other search engine that bans you. All your work will be for nothing.

One of the early black hat techniques was using a font that was the same color as the background. This was done in order to keyword stuff without getting caught. So, if you wanted to be ranked higher for the term dirty blue widgets, you would put that keyword term in several places on your web page in white letters against a white background. Anybody looking at the page would never see them. Imagine if you put that term 100 times at the bottom of the page, white fonts against a white background! That means you're telling the search engine spiders over and over and over and over again what you're all about... and that's cheating. The search engine algorithms are now program to spot that so don't even think about it.

Another technique was to put a large number of your keywords where they would be displayed off the screen. Anyone looking at the screen would never see them but the search engine spiders would pick them up of course. Again, the search engine spiders today are programmed to note if this is being done and you will get penalized for it or possibly even banned.

Another technique is that of cloaking. If a human clicks on a link, an appropriate page is displayed. But if it is detected that the search engine spider is coming through the link, another page is displayed instead of what the human saw that will feed information to enhance the page rank or the search engine rankings. That page will have absolutely nothing to do with the information being supplied to the human but instead be filled with meta-tags or over stuffing of keywords to gain a false ranking.

The search engines and their spider bots have become much more sophisticated in detecting these black hat techniques over the years. Just remember that if you're caught trying to apply any of them, you can lose your position in the search engines by being banned and having to start all over again. Count the cost and decide if it's worth it or not. Learn more about dirty blue widgets and SEO basics using dirty blue widgets keyword term