Black hat is a common term known to search engine optimisers, it is considered as unethical techniques used to get websites increased exposure in search engines.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN wants to ensure they are showing relevant results to their end users. For those who employ successful "Black hat" or "Unethical" techniques to get their sites to show up in the search results pages, more often than not, will not give you the information you were looking for.

For example, if a Webmaster wants to make money with Google Adsense, they place content on a webpage in the hope that when someone finds that page, they will click on an Ad because the content on the page is not useful. In return, the Webmaster gets paid for that click.

The result is poor user experience because of the black hat SEO techniques used by the Webmaster to fool the search engines into believing the page was relevant to the search.

This is exactly what search engines are trying to combat.

If you are a person who is hoping to outsource search engine marketing, then it is important you know what to look out for and avoid when trusting someone with your website.

Here are some common Black hat techniques:

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing can be achieved in a number of ways. It is an unethical technique of using tags such as Meta-tags, Alt tags and title tags to stuff with your target keywords. Search engines reads these tags and can help to indicate what a page is about, however, if you stuff your tags with keywords, and the search engines find out, then this can cause your site to be banned.

An example of keyword stuffing in alt tags (tags attached to images) could look something like:

[img src="images/my_cat.jpg" alt="black hat, dodgy practices, black, hat, spam, unethical,hat black,black hat is cool,im spamming for black hat,practice black hat"]

As you can see, the webmaster is wanting the search engines robots to notice the keyword black hat in the hope it will get a better ranking in the results pages, however, this is unethical and something which if picked up, is likely to get the website thrown out of the search engines.

Hidden Text

The most common way to hide text on a webpage is by setting the font colour of the text to be the same as the page background, this way it is not easily picked up by a site visitor.

People use hidden text to load keywords and phrases into a webpage that is only read by search engines to increase their rankings in search engines. However, this tactic goes against search engine guidelines and if picked up, can get your website banned.

One way to discover if a site has hidden text is to click Edit/Select all in your browser, if you see text, which is otherwise not visible, then this is hidden text.

Doorway Pages

A common example of a doorway page is for a Webmaster to create a page specifically for search engines, which probably would make no sense to a user. They will get the page for search engines ranking, and when a user clicks on the result from a search, they will immediately be redirected to a different page without their knowledge.

An easy way to discover a doorway page is to look at the description in a search result and to look for that content when you click through to that page. If the content is not within the page content or in the description Meta-tag, then it is likely the result you saw was a doorway page.

*Note: Google can sometimes use descriptions in their webpage results from DMOZ, check to see if the site is listed in DMOZ and check the description to clarify the description is not from them.

These are the most common techniques used by Black hat Webmasters

All of these methods can get your site banned from the search engines, so when outsourcing SEO work, check over your website to ensure none of these tactics are being used on your website.