Five Black Hat SEO Terms to Add to your Book
November 1, 2010
In every industry there are good practices and not-so-good, technical terms and basic terminology, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no different. In fact, there are some industries that have niches with their own unique terminology. Such is the case with black hat SEO. What seems to be unique about black hat SEO terms and techniques is the fact that new ones seem to continuously pop up. Although most people in the business are already familiar with practices like “keystuffing”, there are some that are not so well-known. Here are five of those less-known, but just-as-important practices of black hat SEO:
#1: Link Dumping
This is the practice of isolating signatures in code that identify a particular piece of software. Once you can do this with code, you would be able to automate link submissions. In other words, if you are able to determine the signature that is used by a particular forum software, you can write software that crawls a list of URLs or the Web to find instances of that certain software. Once you find those, you can use a script to create user profiles- each having a link back to your site.
#2 Automated Content Generation
This usually refers to using sources other than your own for creating Web pages automatically. We’ve all probably seen them- they are the pages that really don’t make any sense and are useless to the Internet user, but they target the keywords that attract search engine bots. However, with this method top rankings for competitive terms is not likely- it however possible to obtain rankings for the long tail of a search in which aggregate can be pretty lucrative. Techniques include doing things like making the content unique by mixing from different sources, replacing words with synonyms and rearranging blocks of text.
#3 Link Building with XSS
Link building with XSS refers to using vulnerabilities in a site’s underlying code to inject links to a site that is established and trusted by search engines. The more complicated the CMS is, the more likely it is that there are going to be holes in it to exploit. Once those links are established, pinging or linking to those exploited pages can speed up the indexing by search engines. People will put the real site a hop or two away from the link to hide associations with it, sometimes by making it look like an affiliate link.
#4 Parasite Hosting
This one involves the creation of content on a host you do not control. In this case it would be a host that is super-trusted by search engines, which makes the content easily rank for the targeted keyword. The page would ideally serve legitimate-looking content to search engines, but will direct users to the page of your choice. There is also a variation of parasite hosting when you find accounts that are no longer used on websites such as WordPress, for example, which leaves trusted URLs up for grabs.
#5 Overriding Back-Button Clicks
This is another one that so many people have seen, yet a huge majority of them will not realize that it is some black hat SEO that is going on. When a user leaves a website, that site loses the opportunity to monetize that traffic. However, people have discovered that intercepting that back-button click and having the user led to a page not of their choosing is pretty easily done. There are even those who are super sneaky and will make the destination page look like the page that the user was expecting to go to with that back button.
And I’ll close with the usual riff of how black hat SEO is bad, shame shame, never do it or you’ll die, and so on!