After looking at SEO and the benefits it can have, it’s a good idea to look at what can go wrong or badly with SEO. Bad Search engine optimising is called ‘black hat’ as opposed to correct and helpful – or ‘white hat’ SEO.
What is Black Hat SEO?
There isn’t ‘bad’ search engine optimisation per se; it’s more like bad practise in SEO. The black and white hat terminology comes from the way in which people and companies attempt to boost their website’s ranking.
White hat SEO attempts to work within the boundaries of the search engine, trying to guess what the engine likes and working from there to improve site rankings. This involves some trial and error, but for the most part is definitely what search engine providers prefer and tends to give positive, regular and reliable results.
Black hat search engine optimisation attempts to trick the search engine and artificially boost site rankings. Black hat users attempt to game the search engines, guessing at what the search engine’s algorithm is looking for numerically, mathematically and in terms of site code. Black hat SEO will then try to subvert the way that the algorithm works to trick it into giving their site a higher ranking – this is one of the reasons search engine algorithms are kept secret.
An Example of Black Hat Search Engine Optimisation
To begin with one part of most algorithms was known to be ‘more keywords on the site = greater relevancy = higher up the listing’. However, this led to Black hat work whereby websites would overuse the word in a semi-invisible way.
Taking the word ‘computer’ as the keyword that a search engine is looking for, one can see how this would work. The user types ‘computer’ into the search bar. As it stood, sites with more examples of the word ‘computer’ in their content would get to the top of the search results.
However black hat users would trick the search. Sites would have a black background and then write (in the smallest possible font) ‘computer’ in black font onto the background. This meant that while a user couldn’t see it, and would only see a black background, the search engine would find that the website had ‘computer’ written on it millions of times and would think it was highly relevant.
Black Hat can have very negative results
Doing this today will get a website blacklisted and taken off most search engines, and the algorithms have been changed to see keywords as a part of the relevancy equation rather than the whole thing. So most sites will still contain a fair few keywords or phrases (about 7-8 on each page) but won’t overuse them.
All search engine providers are constantly working to improve the way that their engines work and to stop black hat work. So while black hat can be very effective, its success is often short lived.
James Barry - James Barry is a freelance writer, director and producer. He has worked in a huge range of jobs from the esoteric to the mundane
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